Romanticism began with Rousseau and ended with American
Transcendentalism, it came crashing through the salons of
neo-classicism with the cry of revolutionary idealism and sank into
respectability with the Boston Brahmins. Professor Abrams fixes the
dates at 1789 to 1835; others, more liberally, suggest 1756 to
1848. No matter: the subject is wide, complex, and variegated, the
most important cultural movement of recent history, and Professor
Abrams has risen to the challenge with his colors flying. It is a
remarkable work, the best since Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony,
though humane and optimistic where Praz's classic was dark and
Freudian-oriented: "Both read the Bible day and night/ But thou
readst black where I read white." The essential point is that
Romanticism was an "endeavor to salvage traditional experience and
values by accommodating them to premises tenable to a later age."
Thus Abrams concentrates on the transformation of traditional
religious concepts, especially Christian mysticism, into a new
poetics celebrating Love and Nature, as well as showing how
Biblical eschatology influenced Hegelian philosophy and the social
and political crises which followed in its wake. "In effect these
poets cry out for a transformation of history from the shape of
eternal recurrence to the shape of apocalyptic prophecy, in which
history reaches its highest point and then stops." This has
contemporary overtones and Abrams is not averse to drawing pungent
parallels between the past and the present day. He is much too
generous with Wordworth, who was not "one of the great masters of
complex poetic structure," but his enthusiasm is attractive, his
erudition sublime. A superior study. (Kirkus Reviews)
"The first modern study of the Romantic achievement, its origins and evolution both in theory and practice."—Stuart M. Sperry, Jr., Indiana Unviersity In this remarkable new book, M. H. abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789–1835)—the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of the age.
But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in the same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.
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