In her elegiac Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Anna Letitia Barbauld speculates on the precariousness of genius, its grandeur, its capriciousness, its unpredictability, and within her contemplations is an ambivalence for the esteem as well as cost of Enlightenment reason. Endeavoring to temper excess and admonish arrogance—what Hannah Arendt deems homo faber, or the very means by which the pillars of genius and reason can bring their inspiration to fruition—Barbauld methodically underscores the primacy of the communal landscape out of which genius can emerge. In effect, Barbauld’s memento mori forecasts the demise of the heyday of British progress, and instrumental to this decline is a critique of the changing economic processes of commerce, trade, and mercantilism. As Arendt explores, modernity instrumentalized homo faber, making even human artifact bound to means rather than ends. Craft and, perhaps, even art, in other words, is subordinated to process. The very homo faber that makes the worldliness of genius possible is bound to instrumentality and devaluation. Despite its novelty, genius is still subject to the conditions of becoming, of a certain kind of production, of process, for it to manifest. Viewing Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven in terms of Arendt’s phenomenology underscores the extent to which Barbauld’s critique of grandeur was, perhaps, forecasting something more sinister for her own era as well our own.