Greater Romantic Lyric

Abstract

The term ‘greater Romantic lyric’ derives from M.H. Abrams's 1965 essay, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’, in which he identifies this poetic type as a distinctive ‘species’ of the longer Romantic lyric, one which in his estimation ‘displaced’ the greater ode of the eighteenth century and produced some of the greatest Romantic achievements in lyric poetry. Characterized by the counter‐movements of description and meditation, the ‘greater Romantic lyric’ habitually opens with a description of local, observed details before turning inwards, as the lyric speaker, provoked by one or more of the details of the outer scene, takes up the burden of a sustained meditation consisting in memory, thought, and anticipation, before finally returning to the opening scene with a sense both of achieved insight and, structurally, of lyric rondure. According to Abrams's classification, Coleridge's ‘The Eolian Harp’ (‘Effusion XXXV’; 1795) is the first instance of this type of lyric (and Coleridge its most important practitioner), which also includes ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘Fears in Solitude’, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, Wordsworth's ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘Ode (“There was a time”)’, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, as well as Shelley's ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’ and (with some variation) both Shelley's ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. For Abrams, this form constitutes nothing less than the earliest Romantic formal ‘invention’. As he writes, ‘New lyric forms are not as plentiful as blackberries, and when one turns up, it is worth critical attention’ (Abrams 1984c: 79). In his influential denomination and analysis of this form (one which he variously describes in organic and mechanical terms), Abrams carefully combines a number of the modes and moods that inform our understanding of Romantic poetry in analysing its genesis (its relation to its own literary antecedents, most notably the eighteenth‐century traditions of the ode and the locodescriptive poem) and assessing why this particular mode appealed so powerfully to the Romantic poets under scrutiny. By ‘greater’, Abrams summons the grandeur of the elevated Pindaric inflection of the ‘great ode’, which he then balances with the highly individual inflection of ‘lyric’, an essentially intimate form of meditation and address (more akin to the ‘lesser ode’ routinely affiliated with Horace). And with ‘Romantic’ he locates the form historically both as a legible break with neoclassical eighteenth‐century traditions and as an influential precursor of numerous nineteenth‐and twentieth‐century lyrics in the same vein. Whether or not the ‘greater Romantic lyric’ in fact constitutes either the earliest Romantic formal invention or a distinct lyric species, Abrams's taxonomy for this mode has had – and continues to have – an abiding influence over our conception of such matters as the taxonomy of Romantic lyric poetry, the history of genre theory, and the place of lyric poetry in our understanding of Romanticism. Abrams's claim persists in Romantic studies both as a powerful explanatory tool for the Romantic lyric and as an object of critique in itself. However few or many poems it may finally describe, Abrams's delineation of the ‘greater Romantic lyric’ underscores a central impulse towards formal and historical classification in both Romanticism and contemporary criticism.