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The article reports that a few nineteenth-century authors on both sides of the cultural divide negotiate, with reference to the Romantic past, an increasingly unstable antinomy between bodily affection and refined response. This dialectical antagonism between elite and popular literary aesthetics might be understood as the legacy of an equally dialectical conception of aesthetic experience that has its origins in British Romanticism. For while conceiving sensation as more properly a stimulus to reflection than an end in itself, William Wordsworth's example blurs as fully as it enforces distinctions between the genres to which these responses are thought to correspond, disclosing alternative legacies that the poet himself could not have foreseen.

Discusses the concepts of common sense and the literature of self-experiment contained in the literary works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Key issues of interest; Analysis of pertinent topics and relevant issues; Implications on literary studies.