Erasmus Darwin and Wordsworth’s Poetics

Abstract

The rise of New Historicist criticism in the 1980s prompted amongst Romantic critics a tendency to self-scrutiny which was manifested in Jerome McGann’s analysis of the ‘Romantic ideology’ acted out in critical work on Romanticism,1 and in Clifford Siskin’s more detailed study of the relationship between Romantic poetics and the rhetoric of contemporary Romantic critics.2 What must accompany any attempt to answer the question ‘What is Romanticism?’, these critics implied, is scrutiny of the literary academic institution which has historically been responsible for production of the category ‘Romanticism’.KeywordsEarly NineteenthFrench RevolutionAssociative ProcessVital EnergyMedical ThoughtThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.