American Romanticism, Again

Abstract

I. Romantic Lyric THE DEFINITION OF ROMANTICISM MAY BE (LIKE ALL--ISMS) A MATTER of great debate, but little of that debate has had much to do with poetry. When in 1924 Arthur O. Lovejoy proposed abandoning term as literary historical frame, complaining that the word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing, nineteenth-century poetry was one of those too many things. (1) When Rene Wellek responded to Lovejoy in 1949 by arguing that one must conceive of period terms not as arbitrary linguistic labels nor as metaphysical entities, but as names for systems of norms which dominate literature at specific time of historical process, norms that dominated poetry in nineteenth century were one of systems he had in mind. (2) When these founders of history of ideas and of modern comparative literary study talked about Romanticism, it is safe to assume that they meant European Romanticism, and when Anglo-American literary critics today continue to talk about Romanticism--or when upper case noun becomes lower case adjective (as in, the novel, or, most often, romantic poetry), or even when it is shortened to Northrop Frye's stenographer's shorthand, Rcsm, which as Anahid Nersessian has recently reminded us, was Frye's unpublished vision of neither too capacious nor too normative, a low adjustment utopia--it is safe to assume that term refers to history of ideas that stretched from mid eighteenth--and nineteenth-century German idealism through late eighteenth--and nineteenth-century European national revolutions (especially French) and that found literary home in British poetics. (3) In departments of English, we know that when we talk about Romantic Poetry we don't just mean Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Shelley and Byron but also Hemans and Scott and Smith and Barbauld and Baillie and Bums and Clare and list goes on--or at least list of British, Irish, and Scots poets continues to expand. Romanticists themselves may admit that their original canon was framed by Paris editor and swiftly republished in Philadephia (and so, as Meredith McGill points out, was transatlantic from start), or that expressive poetics actually derived from Orientalist Sir William Jones's Sanskrit and Persian translations (and so, as Aamir Mufti points out, was Orientalized from start), or that historical coincidence of emergence of and middle of Middle Passage was no coincidence (and so, as Edouard Glissant and many others have pointed out, was invested in emergence of worst forms of modernity from start), but those admissions have made much difference in way we tell story of and almost no difference in way we conduct business of profession of literary studies. (4) When we do speak of Romanticism, we tend to mean Transcendentalism, and by Transcendentalism, we tend to mean Emerson and writers in conversation with his heady mixture of German philosophy, British poetics, and pragmatism: Fuller, Douglass, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and, as ever perverse exception: Poe. This is to say that just as can still dependably refer to small canon of late eighteenth--and early nineteenth-century British poets, American Romanticism can be counted on to mean what continues to be taught as canon of nineteenth-century literature, which, as Maurice Lee has recently shown, remains (like British Romanticism) stubbornly canonical. (5) Though most scholars know that (as great new Teaching Transatlanticism project launched by Linda Hughes and Sarah Robbins attests) old Transcendentalist, mostly white Anglo-American canons are passe, that they mask all sorts of exchange by and through many writers and readers who occupied much wider and more complex version of Atlantic World than those canons represent, canons themselves don't reflect that knowledge. …