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)
One of the deans of literary criticism in America, M. H. Abrams is
Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the
author of two landmark books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural
Supernaturalism, and general editor of the Norton Anthology of
English Literature. This volume collects the essays, written over
three decades, which-together with his books-testify to his
preeminence. The essays examine Wordsworth's and Coleridge's
innovations in their theories about the language of poetry; the
prevalence, sources, and significance of a key Romantic image, the
"correspondent breeze"; the pervasive revolutionary spirit of
Romanticism; the defining characteristics and chief exemplars of
the most distinctive poetic genre of the age, the "greater Romantic
lyric"; the relation of Coleridge and Wordsworth to modernist
poetics and literature; the philosophic and scientific backgrounds
of Coleridge's thinking; and the numerous manifestations of
apocalypticism in the Romantic period.
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