Nine longish and typically solid pieces by one of the deans of
literary criticism in America. Abrams (Cornell) has established his
reputation with The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Natural
Supernaturalism (1971), which explore the historical roots, the
philosophical creativity, and the poetic visions of the Romantic
movement, chiefly in England and Germany. He continues that
balanced, painstaking work here, concentrating on Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and indulging his polemical vein a bit more than usual:
Abrams judges the poetics (and by implication the poetry) of
Wordsworth and Coleridge superior to that of the Modernists (he
cites, among others, Baudelaire, Valery, Yeats, and Eliot) because
its energizing goals of this-worldly Apocalypse, of organic form
and cosmic harmony, are gander and more humane. When, for example,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley advance "symbolic equations
between breeze, breath, and soul, respiration and inspiration, the
reanimation of nature and of the spirit," they usher us into a
world more profoundly allusive (freighted with the Hebrew ruach,
the Holy Ghost, Stoic Pneuma, etc.) and more "livable" than the
autotelic, alienated, hyper-aesthetic "Byzantiums" of the
post-Romantics. Abrams spends most of his time, however, on
straightforward explication: reaffirming the link between
Romanticism and the French Revolution, tracing Coleridge's
infatuation and then disenchantment with the sonnets of William
Bowles, defining and analyzing the structure of "the greater
Romantic lyric" (Frost at Midnight, Tintern Abbey, Stanzas Written
in Dejection, et al.). Abrams is not a notable prose stylist, but
he can sum up whole epochs and genres with a telling phrase, as
when he calls the Prelude and Sartor Resartus "a theodicy of the
individual life." Somewhat repetitious for those who know his
books, but admirably cogent and erudite throughout. (Kirkus
Reviews)
The real test of Abram s historical explanations is of course
whether or not they work whether, when we apply the criteria of
correspondence and coherence (Just as in interpreting a poem), they
make sense out of the particulars at hand and produce useful
generalizations even in the face of competing historical
interpretations. Abrams work continues to hold up. Jack Stillinger"
General
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