Scholarly and Strident Romanticism

...marvelous births, which lies hidden in the very womb of orderly creation " Now, with the recent revival of interest in early 19th-century literature, two noted scholars, M H Abrams and Harold Bloom, have tried their hand at redefining and illuminating the Romantic phenomenon Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism, the more solid and conventional of these radically diverse studies, is concerned primarily with "the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking " In this view, the best Romantic writers paralleled the new modes of thought being developed by the philosophers of their day—illustrating, in Shelley's words, "the spint of the age acting on all" Accordingly, Abrams sees William Wordsworth as the central literary figure of the period (roughly 1789-1835) and, paraphrasing the "prospectus" to his long poem "The Excursion," focuses on the poet's desire to show how "an individual mind —and perhaps the developing mind of generic man as well—is fitted to the external world, and the external world to the mind, and how the two in union are able to beget a new world ' Indeed, Wordsworth's prospectus" becomes the hub of Abrams' book, with each part generating out from it like the spokes of a wheel He traces the precursors of the poet's Romantic vision—from the Biblical concept of the divme marriage in Revelations, through the medieval passion of St Augustine's Confessions, to the renaissance exuberance of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene—until it is transformed by the secularism of the late 18th century In the end, Wordsworth's poem is shown to be a prospectus for Romanticism itself, a new Revelation Abrams goes on to portray the "exemplary Romantic situation the speaker alone on a windy cliff, fronting the open landscape, and experiencing essential liberty in the power of his being to unite with, and so to repossess, the scene before hrm, in an act of enfranchised perception which is an act of spontaneous love " In their quest for a new perception, some (notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Qumcey in England, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud in France) used drugs —often with destructive results, others, like Shelley, flouted convention by espousing atheism, free love and revolutionary doctrines, still others, like Wordsworth, confined their new order of experience to their thought and writings Though his subject is complex, frequently philosophical, and not intended as popular reading (many foreign quotations are left untranslated), Abrams' book is clearly written and superbly organized Natural Supernaturalism is an important work that should rank with the author's celebrated The Minor and the Lamp The same cannot be said of Harold Bloom's The Ringers in the Tower Bloom was Abrams' student, and each shows a superficial indebtedness to the other's ideas Yet in contrast to Abrams' judicious and scholarly tone, Bloom's voice is passionate and stridently assertive Abrams also accepts and builds on much established opinion, while Bloom is wildly revisionary, even in his definition of Romanticism "Conn a Schlegel, it may be affirmed that Romantic poetry from Blake down to Yeats and Wallace Stevens has no quarrel with 'orderly creation' and makes no case against reason The polemic of Romantic, which is to say, of the most vital modern poetry, is directed against inadequate accounts of reason Bloom's major figure is "the Romantic poet and New Left agitator Shelley," and a large part of the book is an attempt to restore Ins reputation in academic circles Bloom is certainly justified in thinking that a generation whose poetic credo has been shaped by William Carlos Williams' dictum "no ideas but m things" has difficulty understanding Shelley, who "chants an energetic becoming that cannot be described in the concrete because its entire purpose is to modify the concrete, to compel a greater reality to appear " Bloom, however, is not trying to teach this generation plurality or tolerance, he is trying to convert it "Compared to [D H Lawrence's "Tortoise Shout"], the religious poetry of Eliot suggests everywhere an absence of mind, a poverty of intention, a reliance upon the ntual frenzy of others," he asserts But he canonizes the obscure A R Amnions as "the central poet of my generation" whose work "helps me to live my life " Bloom's enemies are traditionalists (especially Christians, even if, as m the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins, they are traditional m no other sense) and anyone who is not a Romantic Like many other theoretical critics, Bloom is often earned away by the ideas m a particular poem and cannot see that it is...

...Scholarly and Strident Romanticism Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution m Romantic Literature By M H Abrams Norton 550 pp $10 00 The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition By Harold Bloom Chicago 352 pp $12 00 Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell THE GERMAN critic arid poet, August Wiihelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), defined Romanticism as "the expression of a secret longmg for the chaos which is perpetually striving for new and...

...tor all its content, a bad poem Occasionally, too, he does not realize he is simply reading his own ideas into a poem, foi example when he explains his defense ot Alfred Lord Tennyson's pietistic In Memouam as "an argument for personal love about as restrained and societal as HeafhclifFs passion or Shelley's Epipsychidwn ' At other times, Bloom makes a Procrustean bed of his theories Taking Nietzsche's Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy as a model, he has invented one for American poetry?the oscillation between poetic incarnation (Bacchus) and the merging with necessity (Merlin) ' Such polarizations tend to encourage us to look at literature in broad generalizations which, upon closer examination, break down Similarly, some of Bloom's star-ting remarks are facilitated by his use of undefined terms Claims like 'The Odyssey is the fundamental quest Romance, and the first Romantic poem," or Shelley "knew more about love than Browning, or most men (before or since)," should put the reader on his guard against woolly terminology and extravagant statements The Ringers in the Tower lacks the usual scholarly trappings of footnotes and bibliography, and Bloom has no inhibitions about giving such references as "Somewhere else Freud remarks " Thus, it is not clear what audience he has in mind At one moment, he seems to be involved in academic disputes, then a few pages later he will lecture his readers as if they were Freshman Lit students who had to be told that Shelley's ' Hail to thee, blithe spirit' Bird thou never wert" only makes sense when we understand that the poet is listening to the song of the skylark, and not watching a corporeal bird Since most of the pieces in this volume were originally published as separate essays, their inconsistency in tone is perhaps understandable though no less incongruous Bloom ends his book with a glimpse ot the New Left, to him a neo-Romantic movement, and a somewhat apocalyptic look toward the future In fact, he resembles the characters in Yeats' "The Second Coming" who, facing "mere anarchy" and "the blood-dimmed tide," are "filled with a passionate intensity " The Ringers in the Tower conjures up the most distasteful kind of Romantic sentiment, of which it is a fair example distempered judgments and hysterical adulations...