English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism by M. H. Abrams
English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism by M. H. Abrams
English | Sep 11, 1975 | ISBN: 0195019466 | 496 Pages | PDF | 43,8 MB
English | Sep 11, 1975 | ISBN: 0195019466 | 496 Pages | PDF | 43,8 MB
This highly acclaimed volume contains thirty essays by such leading literary critics as A.O. Lovejoy, Lionel Trilling, C.S. Lewis, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Jonathan Wordsworth, and Jack Stillinger. Covering the major poems by each of the important Romantic poets, the contributors present many significant perspectives in modern criticism–old and new, discursive and explicative, mimetic and rhetorical, literal and mythical, archetypal and phenomenological, pro and con.
This work edited by M.H. Abrams contains many of the most important essays written on English Romantic literature in the twentieth century. It opens with three great essays on the Romantic period, Arthur O.Lovejoy 's seminal 'On the Discrimination of Romanticisms', W.K. Wimsatt's 'The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery' 'M. H. Abrams 'The Correspondent Breeze : A Romantic Metaphor' These three essays alone would make an invaluable small volume.
But then follow three or four essays on each of the great romantic Poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley , Keats.
Northrop Frye, Robert F. Gleckner, Harold Bloom write on Blake. Basil Willey, Carlos Baker, Charles Williams, Lionel Trilling on Wordsworth. George McLean Harper , G. W. Knight, Humphrey House on Coleridge. T.S. Eliot, Ronald Bottrall,Ernest J.Lovell Jr. on Byron. C.S. Lewis, F. B.Leavis, Frederick A. Pottle, Donald Davie on Shelley. Douglas Bush, W.Jackson Bate, Cleanth Brooks, Earl Wasserman, Richard H. Fogle on Keats.
Among the essays I took special interest in was Lionel Trilling 's on Wordsworth 's 'Immortality Ode' Trilling attempts to show that the poem is not as is often supposed about Wordsworth decline in powers as a poet.It is not about a 'natural and inevitable warfare' between the faculty of Poetry, and the faculty by which general ideas are apprehended. It is rather more about the mature vision, the new way of seeing which comes with Age and Experience. It is about a kind of double- vision in which the visionary gleam given in childhood is not fled, but rather remembered; the legacy of childhood is not lost but rather incorporated into the more sober vision given in and with age. " To have once have had the visionary gleam of the perfect union of self and the universe is essential to and definitive of our human nature, and in that sense is connected with the making of poetry.But the visionary gleam is not in itself the poetry- making power, and its diminution is right and inevitable." It is rather incorporated into the larger apprehension of reality which comes with the mature vision. There is Trilling indicates a sorrow with the shift in vision, with a motion from almost exclusive emphasis on Nature to one in which the Moral law and relations with Man become central. The Ode as Trilling understands it is as much about the celebration of new powers that come to the Poet with age as it is about the falling off of certain childhood ones. Trilling too hints the Ode as a transformation from what Keats called Wordsworth 's mode of the 'egotistical sublime' to one to a mode of 'tragedy.'
Thus he reads the great concluding lines ,' To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears' as Wordsworth's acknowledgment of the inevitable sorrowful element of life.
This group of essays is a tremendously rich body of perception and reflection on what is undoubtedly one of the great bodies of poetic work in world literature.
But then follow three or four essays on each of the great romantic Poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley , Keats.
Northrop Frye, Robert F. Gleckner, Harold Bloom write on Blake. Basil Willey, Carlos Baker, Charles Williams, Lionel Trilling on Wordsworth. George McLean Harper , G. W. Knight, Humphrey House on Coleridge. T.S. Eliot, Ronald Bottrall,Ernest J.Lovell Jr. on Byron. C.S. Lewis, F. B.Leavis, Frederick A. Pottle, Donald Davie on Shelley. Douglas Bush, W.Jackson Bate, Cleanth Brooks, Earl Wasserman, Richard H. Fogle on Keats.
Among the essays I took special interest in was Lionel Trilling 's on Wordsworth 's 'Immortality Ode' Trilling attempts to show that the poem is not as is often supposed about Wordsworth decline in powers as a poet.It is not about a 'natural and inevitable warfare' between the faculty of Poetry, and the faculty by which general ideas are apprehended. It is rather more about the mature vision, the new way of seeing which comes with Age and Experience. It is about a kind of double- vision in which the visionary gleam given in childhood is not fled, but rather remembered; the legacy of childhood is not lost but rather incorporated into the more sober vision given in and with age. " To have once have had the visionary gleam of the perfect union of self and the universe is essential to and definitive of our human nature, and in that sense is connected with the making of poetry.But the visionary gleam is not in itself the poetry- making power, and its diminution is right and inevitable." It is rather incorporated into the larger apprehension of reality which comes with the mature vision. There is Trilling indicates a sorrow with the shift in vision, with a motion from almost exclusive emphasis on Nature to one in which the Moral law and relations with Man become central. The Ode as Trilling understands it is as much about the celebration of new powers that come to the Poet with age as it is about the falling off of certain childhood ones. Trilling too hints the Ode as a transformation from what Keats called Wordsworth 's mode of the 'egotistical sublime' to one to a mode of 'tragedy.'
Thus he reads the great concluding lines ,' To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears' as Wordsworth's acknowledgment of the inevitable sorrowful element of life.
This group of essays is a tremendously rich body of perception and reflection on what is undoubtedly one of the great bodies of poetic work in world literature.