Identifying ourselves, others, writers, with their opinions—and taking the form of the opinion as the epitome of political engagement—we assert a picture of the self that ought to be scrutinized. Mass print generated, along with the railways, telegraph, information-relays national and global, as well as the development of specialized forms of technological, scientific, economic, and medical knowledge, a sea of discourse belying any vision of a cogent public sphere: disinformation is not a purely 21st century, internet phenomenon. Poetry helps us understand this situation. Appearing in verse, claims about reality have been characterized, or have self-characterized, as virtual. As such, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry makes perceptible other ways in which, in other precincts, utterance becomes virtualized. Sometimes, by the psychological turbulences of the citizen-as-creature, appropriating world events to the need to self-assert; sometimes, as a result of affective matrices that challenge the idea that we are the authors of our own opinions.
