The anti-romantic movement, which in Britain and America Followed the Hulme-Eliot-Pound broadsides of the early twenties, is now over and done with, and criticism has got its sense of literary tradition properly in focus again. (v)
Wordsworth's Imagination is like Wallace Stevens' "angel surrounded by peasants": not an angel of heaven, but the necessary angel of earth, as, in its sight, we see the earth again, but cleared; and in its hearing we hear the still sad music of humanity, its tragic drone, rise liquidly . . . . For Wordsworth the individual Mind and the external World are exquisitely fitted, each to each other, even as man and wife, and with blended might they accomplish a creation the meaning of which is fully dependent upon the sexual analogy; they give to us a new heaven and a new earth blended into an apocalyptic unity that is simply the matter of common perception and common sexuality raised to the freedom of its natural power. (127)
[T]he central spiritual problem of Romanticism is the difficult relation between nature and consciousness, and its prime historical problem the relation between changing concepts of nature and the French Revolution. The leading formal problem results directly from tehse psiritual and historical stimuli, and is a problem of innovations in literary form : in questions of aesthetic theory, verbal mode, verse forms and metrics, and the new genres or modifications of genre that appeared. (147)
["The Prospectus"] was probably written at some time between 1800 and 1806. . . . A decade or so later, in the Preface to The Excursion (1814), Wordsworth still chose to reprint this radical statement of his poetic intentions. . . . [In it, Wordsworth reveals his belief that], in the line of inspired British poets (what Harold Bloom has called "the Visionary Company"), he has been elected as the successor to Milton. . . . (20-22)
Here, in short, is Wordsworth's conception of his poetic role and his great design. The author, though a "transitory Being," is the latest in the line of poets inspired by the "prophetic Spirit," and as such has been granted a "Vision" (lines 97-8) which sanctions his claim to outdo Milton's Christian story in the scope and audacious novelty of his subject. The vision is that of the awesome depths and height of the human mind, and of the power of that mind as in itself adequate, by consummating a holy marriage with the external universe, to create out of the world of all of us, in a quotidian and recurrent miracle, a new world which is the equivalent of paradise. (28)
Until about ten years ago scholars of romanticism generally accepted Rene Wellek's classic modern definition of their subject: "Imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style." . . . Today that synthesis has collapsed and debate about theory of romanticism is vigorous from cultural studies, feminist scholarship, [etc.] . . . .
Between 1978 and 1983, . . . . I worked to clarify the distinction between "the romantic period" (that is, a particular historical epoch) and "romanticism" (that is, a set of cultural/ideological formations that came to prominence during the romantic period). The distinction is important not merely because so much of the work of that period is not "romantic," but even more, perhaps, because the period is notable for its many ideological struggles. A romantic ethos achieved dominance through sharp cultural conflict . . . ." (735)
A new word is abroad these days in Wordsworth scholarship--`historicist'--and the adjective carries distinctly heterodox overtones. What is thereby refused is an idealizing interpretive model associated with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and even M. H. Abrams. At the same time, historicist critique distinguishes its interests and method from historical scholarship, or from the researches and argumentation of David Erdman, Carl Woodring, E. P. Thompson. More specifically, a number of works published over the last three years position themselves as demystifications of Romanticist readings as well as of Romantic poems. They use history, or sociopolitical reconstruction, to resist the old control of Yale. However, insofar as they repudiate the empiricist, positivist concept of historical fact, in that they focus textual antinomy and erasure rather than manifest theme and achieved form, and in that they use their historical remove with conscious opportunism, these works are deeply of the devil's party.
What difference does gender make to our understanding of British literary Romanticism? . . . Whether we interpret British literary Romanticism as a commitment to imagination, vision and transcendence, as did Meyer Abrams, Harold Bloom and John Beer, or as a questioning, even systematic demystification, of the very possibility of a linguistically unmediated vision, as have Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man and host of others, or as an ideology located in specific political and social events, as urged by Carl Woodring, Jerome McGann and the school of new historical Romanticists inspired by their work, or as a complex configuration derived from all of these recent critical approaches, we nonetheless have based our constructions of British Romanticism almost exclusively upon the writings and thought of six male poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats).
What happens to our interpretations of Romanticism if we focus our attention on the numerous women writers who produced at least half of the literature published in England between 1780 and 1830? . . . . [T]here were over 200 publishing women poets and at least as many novelists, as well as several playwrights, essayists, memoirists and journalists. . . . This book can only attempt an initial, exploratory mapping of this new literary terrain . . . . But even a cursory, introductory survey reveals significant differences between the thematic concerns, formal practices, and ideological positions of male and female Romantic writers. . . . [F]or the most part, . . . women Romantic writers tended to celebrate, not the achievements of the imagination nor the overflow of powerful feelings, but rather the workings of the rational mind, a mind relocated--in a gesture of revolutionary gender implications--in the female as well as the male body. (1-2)