Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It is one of the great ages of criticism; but if we are looking for a general consensus about the true aims and procedures of art, then I suppose that ‘Romantic Literary Criticism’ doesn't really exist, not even in the baggy way that, say, ‘deconstructive criticism’ or ‘The New Criticism’ does. Mentioning it might make us think at once of Coleridge's gigantic attempt to construct a complete theory of literature based on fundamental principles; but then, equally, it might suggest quite the contrary of such systematic ambitions, the occasional, essayistic genius exemplified by Hazlitt. Despite such diversity, however, some major themes recur, often in the form of common indecisions; and in this essay, I am going to take a few related issues which we might choose to see as underlying this great body of work: naturalness (and its opposite, artificiality), organicism (and its opposite, mechanism) and egotism (and its opposite, empathy). Any of these would deserve a long chapter to itself, so I hope only to be suggestive; and I restrict myself to the way these interests shape the criticism of Shakespeare, Milton and Pope, the three most significant authors for critics of the period, and then come to a head in the response to Wordsworth.‘Romantic’ critical concepts do not spring from nowhere of course, and to understand them properly we must see the way they fit into a wider tradition. ... log in or subscribe to read full text