Romantic Fallacies by Richard Hoffpauir

Abstract

Richard Hoffpauir, Romantic Fallacies (New York, Berne, and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986). xxix, 189. $30.50 (u.s.) Richard Hoffpauir writes about English Romanticism as a disciple of Yvor Winters. One would expect such a book to be, in large measure, a filling-inthe -blanks project. Winters himself felt such contempt for the Romantics that he devoted almost no attention to them, but no one who has read five pages of his criticism will be in doubt as to what, generally, he might have said. How, then, should a book such as Romantic Fallacies be judged? Terry Comito, in the preface to his recently published study of Winters, defines the twofold task facing a Wintersian critic today: “not only to preserve Winters in anticipation of some better, more sympathetic age, but to engage him in dialogue with our own.” 1 Hoffpauir, unfortunately, is more interested in preservation than dialogue. Romantic Fallacies was published in 1986, but Hoffpauir refers to almost no criticism published since 1976, except for that written by fellow Wintersians such as C. Q. Drummond and Grosvenor Powell.2 And with the excep­ tion of Meyer Abrams, next to no attention is paid to the major writers on Romanticism who achieved prominence in the generation before 1976: Harold Bloom is mentioned three times, Northrop Frye twice, Geoffrey Hartman (whose name is misspelled in the Index) once. Amy Lowell, by contrast, is referred to four times. This suggests something about Hoffpauir’s emphasis. He attacks, by and large, the people whom Winters would have attacked, and in the way that Winters would have attacked them. But Winters died about twenty years ago. Fortunately, Romantic Fallacies can be read with some profit even by those who are completely unsympathetic to Winters and all he stands for. But this is an undertaking that requires patience and good humour, for Hoffpauir is not a skilled rhetorician, nor is it clear that he has thought carefully about the nature of his audience. For example, he has chosen to include a nineteen-page Introduction outlining his critical position. But a reader familiar with Winters’s ideas will find nothing new here, while some­ one stumbling upon them for the first time will remain unconvinced, because the argumentation is so perfunctory. For whom, then, is the Introduction intended ? Hoffpauir’s prose is lucid and free of the polysyllabic jargon that con­ taminates so much contemporary criticism. On the other hand, his persona is a grimly businesslike being whose self-indulgence is a heavy-handed sar­ casm which becomes, over 183 pages, extremely tedious. I noticed only one attempt at a witty one-liner, which occurs when he suggests that the “ Per­ petual benediction” in the “ Immortality Ode” (“ the fountain-light of all our day, / . . . the master-light of all our seeing” ) is “lit by a very low wat­ tage bulb” (80). More typical is his use of “God forbid” in a sentence in which he wishes to shake his head wearily at the collective folly of our profession: “As well as expanding our consciousness the poem might, God forbid, sharpen it” (159). “ Foolish” is (as with Winters) the adjective of choice for ideas with which one disagrees — but comparison with Winters is in this respect misleading. Winters’s own polemics were aimed at people who had abused him in the past and would have the opportunity to do so again; he was engaged in a real debate. Hoffpauir appears not to have noticed that he is in a somewhat different position. The result is a personal tone that seems odd and irrelevant: John Livingston Lowes will neither know nor care that, in writing The Road to Xanadu, he “ may,” in Hoffpauir ’s opinion, “ have wasted over eight years of his life” (100). The non-Wintersian reader who makes allowance for this sort of thing will find a few rewards. There is a sharp, convincing negative review of Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, an interesting case for a higher valuation of Crabbe, a scrupulous and compelling close reading of the “ Ode to a Night­ ingale.” But the attack on Abrams is expanded unconvincingly to include Romantic theory and practice in general, the case for Crabbe...