Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 by David Fairer

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 455 Poetry” puts it, but for the Romantics it is not because poetry has a palpa­ ble design upon its reader. Rather, “poetic thought” now shares a close in­ timacy with ideology, a condition that can in fact change—in the sense of reform—minds. As Dull7 expounds the critical controversy that has led to some of our confusion over the place of didacticism in Romanticism, he also betrays his own frustration over our current critical moment, a strain that creeps to the surface from time to time throughout this book and that might have been best left out. Discussing political didacticism, he notes that “modern critics are liable to excuse or even commend in a politically moti­ vated text a level of didacticism they might condemn in a morally didactic work—especially if the political views happen to coincide with their own. Indeed, evidence of ideological engagement, overt or covert, in a Roman­ tic text has become for many scholars a virtual precondition of critical ap­ proval, and Romanticism (the British variety at least) is now studied less for its intermittent aspirations to aesthetic autonomy than for its self-conscious politicization ofliterature” (98). There are no footnotes here, and no direct engagement with any critic in particular. Duff—and his important study— ought to be well beyond such angry gestures, for the strength of his text and his research rise far above the straw-figure smugness and self-congratu­ lating benightedness that so exasperates him. The anger that bubbles to the surface in the midst of his patient explanations is a distraction not only be­ cause it battles phantoms, but because the primary point of his text is to find a clear path through the multiple confusions prepared by the Roman­ tics themselves. The domain of current Romantic critics is more complex than Duff seems to grant. If there are some among us who would remake the world in the image of their own self-complacency, let them be and get on with it. This is a minor complaint about an otherwise judicious and impressive book. Duff lays bare the various tangles in which Romanticism meets genre. It is well worth dallying in these engaging knots, for they expose the strength as well as the novelty of Romantic literature. Karen Weisnran University of Toronto David Fairer. Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 17QO—I/Q8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+345. $99.00. Romantic scholarship continues to grapple with the organic model of de­ velopment, born of nineteenth-century German idealism, which became so intimately associated with Coleridge. Although the idealist model has SiR, 51 (Fall 2012) 456 BOOK KEVIEWS been ably challenged from various quarters, it nevertheless generates regu­ lar critical engagement. David Fairer’s Organising Poetry complements a sizeable body ofscholarship in this vein, including Charles Armstrong’s Ro­ mantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (Palgrave, 2003); Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture, edited by Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky (SUNY Albany, 2004); and Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale, 2009) by Denise Cligante, whose turn to life science engages organicism in a fresh way. Because Coleridge so fully espoused German idealism, the critical heritage has held him up as one of its exemplars. Yet this could only occur, argues Fairer, by privileging the mature poet over the Coleridge of the 1790s. As Fairer sees it, the tension between the post-1801 visionary and his younger, naive, alter ego parallels irreconcilable definitions of the organic: that which derives from the ideal­ ist model and that which preceded it—an earlier conception posited by Locke and native to eighteenth-century England. Pursuing that earlier tra­ dition, Fairer’s often brilliant analysis takes us on a path through the tillage of eighteenth-century poetic traditions and historical conceptions, includ­ ing the fecundity ofthe georgic—the poetic sibling ofLockean organicism. In the first three chapters of the book, Fairer establishes the theoretical underpinning for subsequent analysis. The opening chapter’s treatment of the tradition handed down by mid-twentieth-century giants like M. H. Abrams and Morse Peckham is too strong, succinct, and important not to be a candidate for required reading in courses...