Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

From the moment that “Romanticism” emerged as a critical concept – in the second half of the nineteenth century – it described a period that not only succeeded a previous age of Enlightenment but also opposed it. In his History of English Literature , published in 1864, Hippolyte Taine argued that poets like Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth had “violently broken” with eighteenth-century canons of taste and knowledge and had looked past the Enlightenment to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for their models ( Taine 1864/1873 , vol. 3: 423). Indeed, even before there was such a thing as “Romanticism,” Francis Jeffrey characterized the same three poets as “dissenters” from “established systems of poetry and criticism,” and as “perpetually brooding over the disorders by which [civilization's] progress has been attended” ( Jeffrey 1802 : 63, 71). To be sure, Romantic writers themselves had a hand in constructing what Mark Salber Phillips calls the “myth” of a “wholly abstract and detached” Enlightenment ( Phillips 2003 : 446). When friends advised Wordsworth to “prefix” his poems with a “systematic defence” of his poetic theory, he rejected the suggestion because, as he explained in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) , he did not want to be suspected “of reasoning [the reader] into approbation” of his poetry. Poetry is not systematic or reasonable; ... log in or subscribe to read full text