The Iconic Poem and the Aesthetic Tradition

Abstract

presence of at least twenty iconic poems among the complete works of Rossetti and four in Swinburne's first collection of lyrics is indicative of a remarkable shift in sensibility during the nineteenth century. For the genre is conspicuously absent from the poetry of the influential first-generation Romanticists. During their heyday, Wordsworth and Coleridge programmatically shunned .the mean and vulgar works of man and sought beautiful and permanent forms exclusively in nature.' But their endeavor ran counter to the advance of scientific inquiry. As the gradualism which pervaded nineteenth-century science slowly infiltrated popular thought, belief in even a carefully qualified natural benevolism became increasingly difficult to sustain. Certainly, Marshall McLuhan overstates the case when he writes, The early Romantics sought aesthetic emotion in natural scenes; the later Romantics confidently evoked art-emotion from art-situations. 2 But the preoccupation of the later Romanticists with natural process and their related search for beautiful and permanent forms specifically among 'the works of man are grounds for postulating a coherent later phase of Romanticism-an Art Romanticism or Aestheticism-which begins with the poetry of Keats. Aesthetic poet's special regard for art and art experience was prompted in great part by his obsession with the impermanence of natural phenomena. In an age when even consciousness was defined as motion-the ceaseless flight of discontinuous perceptions-nothing was more precious than the moment in which the intensity of sensation invited imaginative response. Once aroused, the imagination invested sensation with significance, transforming the sensible object into an image of enduring value. To those poets still concerned with revising the British empirical tradition, imaginative experience-the fusion of subjective consciousness with its object-appeared to be a mode of discovering the timeless in the temporal instance, the ideal in sensible