English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism

This work edited by M.H. Abrams contains many of the most important essays written on English Romantic literature in the twentieth century. It opens with three great essays on the Romantic period, Arthur O.Lovejoy 's seminal 'On the Discrimination of Romanticisms', W.K. Wimsatt's 'The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery' 'M. H. Abrams 'The Correspondent Breeze : A Romantic Metaphor' These three essays alone would make an invaluable small volume. But then follow three or four essays on each of the great romantic Poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley , Keats. Northrop Frye, Robert F. Gleckner, Harold Bloom write on Blake. Basil Willey, Carlos Baker, Charles Williams, Lionel Trilling on Wordsworth. George McLean Harper , G. W. Knight, Humphrey House on Coleridge. T.S. Eliot, Ronald Bottrall,Ernest J.Lovell Jr. on Byron. C.S. Lewis, F. B.Leavis, Frederick A. Pottle, Donald Davie on Shelley. Douglas Bush, W.Jackson Bate, Cleanth Brooks, Earl Wasserman, Richard H. Fogle on Keats. Among the essays I took special interest in was Lionel Trilling 's on Wordsworth 's 'Immortality Ode' Trilling attempts to show that the poem is not as is often supposed about Wordsworth decline in powers as a poet.It is not about a 'natural and inevitable warfare' between the faculty of Poetry, and the faculty by which general ideas are apprehended. It is rather more about the mature vision, the new way of seeing which comes with Age and Experience. It is about a kind of double- vision in which the visionary gleam given in childhood is not fled, but rather remembered; the legacy of childhood is not lost but rather incorporated into the more sober vision given in and with age. " To have once have had the visionary gleam of the perfect union of self and the universe is essential to and definitive of our human nature, and in that sense is connected with the making of poetry.But the visionary gleam is not in itself the poetry- making power, and its diminution is right and inevitable." It is rather incorporated into the larger apprehension of reality which comes with the mature vision. There is Trilling indicates a sorrow with the shift in vision, with a motion from almost exclusive emphasis on Nature to one in which the Moral law and relations with Man become central. The Ode as Trilling understands it is as much about the celebration of new powers that come to the Poet with age as it is about the falling off of certain childhood ones. Trilling too hints the Ode as a transformation from what Keats called Wordsworth 's mode of the 'egotistical sublime' to one to a mode of 'tragedy.' Thus he reads the great concluding lines ,' To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears' as Wordsworth's acknowledgment of the inevitable sorrowful element of life. This group of essays is a tremendously rich body of perception and reflection on what is undoubtedly one of the great bodies of poetic work in world literature.

This collection of essays represents a field of perspectives so widely diverse and, in many cases, antipathetical, that it really amounts to too much for a short review like this to give it its full due.-The apt alternative: to give a brief description of the book, and then pick a couple excerpts from essays I like or dislike in the book and explain why.-First of all, the book is not for the shallow-minded. All the essays (with a couple exceptions) are well thought-out explications and critiques of viewpoints of Romantic poems and poets which require considerable exertion of mind to comprehend. The exceptions occur in essays where the writers are too dismissive of certain poets and poems and fail to exert THEIR minds, possibly because of incapacity. Such is the case when F.R. Leavis dismisses the first lines of Shelley's towering, contemplative poem "Mount Blanc" (along with all the rest of Shelley's poetry, one might add) as "...insortably and indistinguishably confused." The lines in question: "The everlasting universe of things flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, now dark-now glittering-now reflecting gloom-now lending splendour, where from secret springs the source of human thought its tribute brings of waters-with a sound but half its own..." These first few lines of the great poem are not that hard to make sense of if one but puts forth half an effort: The contemplative human mind is the passive recepient of all it perceives (i.e., the everlasting universe of things) which like a great river in different parts of its course will exhibit differing reflections and imaginings; whereas the mind, "the source of human thought" is but a tributary to this great river, "with a sound but half its own." In other words, mere human thoughts pale in comparison to the torrent of impressions (i.e., the everlasting universe of things) flowing through the mind. But Leavis had his mind made up, and it is doubtful he even gave the poem a chance, such was his animus for Shelley, as evinced in the rest of his essay-But there, C.S. Lewis in his essay in defense of Shelley offers a fine riposte, "I address myself, of course, only to those who are prepared, by toleration of the theme, to let the poem have a fair hearing. For those who are not, we can only say that they may doubtless be very worthy people, but they have no place in the European tradition."-Ouch!-And also Pottle in his fine essay, "The Case of Shelley," attributes such dismissals as that of Mr. Leavis to "...the very human but unregenerate passion for bullying other people." OK, I've said more than enough for the prospective reader to get an idea of what this book is about: the continuing battle over what the Romantics are all about and what they mean to us, if anything. I, personally, would hope the reader would come away from this book with a refreshed notion of how precious and indispensable they are to our appreciation of all poetry and, moreover, to this life itself.