Greater Romantic Lyric Research Articles

Ecopoetics and Boyopoetics: Bloomfield, Clare and the Nature of Lyric

ABSTRACT This article investigates the ecological lyrics of Robert Bloomfield and John Clare, suggesting that the elision of adult subject-positions in the latter was influenced by the pioneering poetry of the former. An alternative to the sublime egotism of William Wordsworth, and to the “Greater Romantic Lyric” as defined by twentieth-century criticism, Bloomfield’s and Clare’s eco-poetry is characterized by a delicate, intricate and valuable lyricism that does not use nature as a sounding-bound for a supposedly timeless, bourgeois male subjectivity. But it was shaped as much by the book market—by class-based restrictions on laboring-class men’s access to print—as by the poets’ exceptionally selfless environmentalism.

Rephrasing the Lyric Subject: Keats’s Dialectical Soul-Making

This essay brings together Keats’s theory of soul-making with his prosody in order to argue for the continued use and usefulness of the concept of lyric subjectivity. Given the instability and recent disfavor imputed to both of these terms (lyric and subject), this might seem a problematic endeavor. Yet I argue, along with Keats, that the process of constructing a soul is not only ineluctably wrapped up with the process of poetic production and reception, but also inextricably tied to the process of first imagining and then constructing new forms of sociality and subjectivity. Through an examination of M. H. Abrams’s theory of the “greater romantic lyric,” I show how a specific form of dialecticism has been read back over the entire canon of romantic and post-romantic poetry, with, as writers associated with the Historical Poetics group have pointed out, deleterious effects. Applying the post-Marxist dialectical theories of the Russian Formalists to targeted close readings of Keats’s poems and letters, I ...

Astronomy and the “Greater Romantic Lyric”

Astronomy and the “Greater Romantic Lyric”

Nima Yushij's "Afsaneh" as a Striking Exemplar of the 'Greater Romantic Lyric'

Persian poetry lingered upon the old classical Persian prosody for more than a thousand year that it stagnated and stopped flowering new concepts and forms. However, Nima broke the dull and monotonous routine of Persian poetry by writing the first true modernist poem. When Nima's "Afsaneh" appeared, traditionalist adamantly opposed its new artistic and aesthetic view due to revealing some similarity with great European romantic examples. The similarity can never be considered as a weak point of "Afsaneh" because Nima has masterfully used European romantic elements to refresh the long-standing tradition of Persian poetry. In this respect, Nima has written his poetry consciously or unconsciously in the same poetic style of great European romantic poets. M. H. Abrams has labeled this poetic style "the greater romantic lyric". As a result, it is tried to examine Nima's "Afsaneh" with respect to Abrams's definition of "the greater romantic lyric" so as to prove that Nima's "Afsaneh" closely conform to this new poetic genre.

Moderation in the Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and the Ballad Debates of the 1790s

IAN NEWMAN Moderation in the Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and the Ballad Debates ofthe 1790s I N A GENERALLY FAVORABLE REVIEW OF THE I 800 EDITION OF THE LYRICAL Ballads published in The British Critic, John Stoddart took exception to the title of Wordsworth’s collection for two reasons. Firstly, there were many compositions in blank verse that were not at all lyrical, and secondly, the title was a tautology: “For what Ballads are not Lyrical?” he asked.1 Precisely what Stoddart understood by the terms “lyrical” and “ballad” is not entirely clear, but his suggestion that ballads had always been lyrical challenges the frequent supposition that in combining these terms Words­ worth and Coleridge had developed a revolutionary new form of poetic expression. Marilyn Butler, for example, wrote that “by adding the implic­ itly genteel ‘Lyrical’ to the plebeian ‘Ballad,’ ” Wordsworth and Coleridge signaled a “change of direction” for English radical poetry.2 As Stoddart’s review implies, however, a decade after the French Revolution it was not at all self-evident that these poetic forms mapped as cleanly onto social hierarchies as Butler implies.3 Whether the term “lyrical ballad” was a contradiction, a tautology, or an unexceptional generic description is significant given the claims frequently made for the revolutionary nature ofWordsworth’s and Coleridge’s collec­ tion, and its monumental position in the canon of British poetry. The na­ ture of the lyric has been a touchstone for Romanticist scholarship since well before M. H. Abrams first described the “Greater Romantic Lyric” in 1965.4 The ballad, however, has received a similar kind of attention only 1. [Stoddart], The British Critic 17 (1801): 131. 2. Butler, “Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse,” London Review ofBooks 14 (6 Au­ gust 1992): 12-13. 3. For a more recent take on what it means to make the ballad lyrical see Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 87-132. 4. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to SiR, 55 (Summer 2016) 185 186 IAN NEWMAN more recently but, as I hope to demonstrate, it is worth our trouble to be precise about what was understood by the term “ballad” in the period lead­ ing up to the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s collection. By mapping the landscape ofpopular balladry in the 1790s, taking into account both radical and conservative valuations, I will show how the ballad form had become suffused with anxieties about class, literacy, piety and the in­ teraction of orality and print. Seen in the context of ongoing controversies about the ballad, it becomes clear how careful Wordsworth is in the “Preface” to present his collection neither as revolutionary, nor as a with­ drawal from the political domain, but as cautiously, complexly moderate— a thorny middle ground between radical zeal and sanctimonious piety. My main interest here is in Wordsworth’s theory of balladry, and how the “Preface” participates in contemporary debates about the aesthetics and politics of the ballad and the stakes involved in engaging those debates. As critics from Wordsworth’s contemporaries on have frequently pointed out, however, the “Preface” and the poems it precedes are not necessarily coex­ tensive, and the theory is often unevenly deployed in practice. But seen in the light of the ballad debates of the 1790s, certain poems in the collection that have received scant critical attention, such as “The Two Thieves,” ap­ pear newly significant for the way they engage with ballad debates. A de­ tailed excavation of these controversies helps us understand that Stoddart’s objection to the tautology of the collection’s title was a calculated stance, itself an intervention into fiercely contested disputes over the meaning of the ballad form. As I will show, no one who had lived through the 1790s— not Stoddart, and certainly not Wordsworth—could have been insensible to the powerfully contested social, moral, and political valances that balladry carried during the revolutionary decade. Before exploring this ter­ rain in more detail, however, it will be helpful to understand in broad terms what is meant by the term ballad. 1. Defining the Ballad Commonly defined as...

David Duff Romanticism and the Uses of GenreRomanticism and the Uses of Genre. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

<i>David Duff</i> Romanticism and the Uses of Genre<i>Romanticism and the Uses of Genre</i>. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

Close confinement: John Thelwall and the Romantic prison

The prison was the central institutional means for silencing dissent in 1790s Britain. While attention to prisons was called for by John Howard in the 1770s, prison conditions commanded broad attention by the 1790s, when dozens of writers, editors, journalists, and booksellers lived through or were threatened with imprisonment. The 1790s saw the first systematic imprisonment of British literati, resulting in a flurry of poems, essays, broadsheets, drawings, and newspaper reports that introduced a wide range of readers to life inside a jail cell. The birth of “prison literature” is twin to the birth of British Romanticism: the prison plays an important role in the work of Thelwall, Coleridge, More, Wordsworth, Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and of lesser‐known figures such as James Montgomery, John Augustus Bonney, and Charles Piggot. This essay examines the writing of prison poets such as Thelwall, Montgomery, and Bonney, arguing that the experience of confinement drew these writers to shape their poetry in ways that would anticipate and influence the conventions of Romantic verse. In inaugurating the formal complex that M.H. Abrams called the “greater Romantic lyric,” 1790s prison poetry is an unrecognized but important space for our understanding of the history of poetic form.

Paradise Decomposed: Byron's Decadence and Wordsworthian Nature in Childe Harold III and IV

Venice's 'evident decay' might repulse others, but Byron said he had been 'familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation'.1 The Italian city's crumbling architecture, mildewed walls and dangerous passageways harmonised not only with recollections of his ancestral Newstead Abbey, but with the 'Orient' that had captivated and liberated him on his journey with his friend John Cam Hobhouse in 1810-11. That trip had inspired Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I and II, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, Parisina and The Siege of Corinth. In a letter to Thomas Moore of 17 November 1816, Byron presents Venice, the current source of his inspiration, as an amalgam: a paradisal 'greenest island' that is also a decadent city,2 only one step in thought away from the lawless Eastern regions that had provided scope for the indulgence of his homosexual passions. Thus, Byron consciously locates the keenest pangs of the ardour that fed his imagination in what is decadent, desolate, buried and ruined. As Dame Rose Macaulay once observed, there is 'no end to the disinterment of ruined antiquity in Asia Minor, for more, no doubt, is under the ground than above it'.3 And more is under the psyche than can be observed on its surface, for, as many have noted, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV touch (paradoxically?) several times upon Wordsworthian nature, as if it might after all prove important as a creative source.4 It is a strange and interesting moment in Byron's career, and one in which Wordsworth certainly played a part, but, ultimately, only a minor one. Byron generally focused on Wordsworth as an object of satire, but he also learned from the older poet. In the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, one finds the occasional Wordsworthian note: 'Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain air, / And life, that bloated ease can never hope to share' (CHP I, 30). Alan Rawes has argued that such borrowing is superficial compared to the deeper engagement Byron had with Wordsworthian 'procedures' and 'the Greater Romantic Lyric'.5 Overt Wordsworthian touches in Childe Harold I and II do indeed seem more like grace-notes lost in a thundering fugue of war, bloodshed and political and amorous treachery. Byron's engagement with Wordsworthian ideas about nature seems transient and superficial. Wherever he travels, from Portugal to Spain or Greece, what Byron looks for and finds is abundant historical evidence that 'keen Vengeance' has been at work (CHP I, 87). He explores battlefields from Talavera to Marathon. The Parthenon's 'broken arch, its ruined wall, / Its chambers desolate, and portals foul' make an apt counterpart to a skull, that 'dome of Thought' and 'palace of the Soul' which seems to peer at him 'through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole' (CHP II, 6). Admittedly, in his 1812 incarnation, Harold temporarily escapes 'to hold / Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd' (CHP II, 25), and later pauses to remark that 'Dear Nature is the kindest mother still' (CHP II, 37). At such moments, as Rawes notes, it seems Byron is truly 'toying with, or meditating upon, an idea of escaping into transcendent communion with nature that is very close to the Wordsworth paradigm'.6 But if Nature is the 'kindest mother', Harold still admits that he always 'lov'd her best in wrath' (CHP II, 37). Harold also takes pleasure in the barbarity of Albanian music 'half s[u]ng, half scream'd' (CHP II, 72) and other ironic or macabre moments connoting life's ephemerality. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage end with the theme of time, and the loss of his friends and mother: 'Roll on vain days! full reckless may ye flow / Since time hath reft whate'er my soul enjoy'd, / And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloy'd' (CHP II, 98).7 Newer ills sped Byron across the channel a short four years later, and within days of his departure in April 1816 he began to write the continuation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. …

Caliban to the Audience: Auden's Revision of Wordsworth's Sublime

--A wish was now ingender'd in my fear / To cleave unto this Man --Wordsworth STRIDING UP TO HIM IN FURY, YOU GLARE INTO HIS UNBLINKING EYES and stop dead, transfixed with horror at seeing reflected there, not what you had always expected to see, conqueror smiling at conqueror, both promising mountains and marvels, but gibbering fist-clenched creature with which you are all too unfamiliar the only subject that you have the all too flesh you must acknowledge as your own. (1) In the middle of W. H. Auden's mid-career prose poem, to the Audience, Caliban describes what happens when, looking for Ariel, the imagination, the audience finds Caliban instead, disturbing reminder of the begged question of its existence: solid flesh, as it were, mysteriously linked to the less-than-solid imagination. Like Ariel, Caliban is ubiquitous presence who refuses to go away. As he reminds the audience at the very beginning of his address, even when it seeks the good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain it is I who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture ... (CP 422). Auden's poem circles around this begged question of existence as Caliban takes his audience through an impossibly circular, tripartite structure that adroitly performs the same begged question. address thus proceeds with recursively interwoven echo and apostrophe: in dense style of hyperbole and convoluted sentence structure. From the time it was published, the elaborate of the address suggested--and continues to suggest--to that the poem is about the ultimate and collapse of poetry, especially the imagination required to produce it. As such, and as the last section of Auden's long poem, The Sea and Mirror, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Tempest, Caliban's address does what many argue of Shakespeare's Tempest: it exposes its art as mere This way of thinking lends itself well to support the view of those who see Auden becoming anti-Romantic at mid-career, turning his genius to undermining poetry and serving as licensed jester. This way of thinking, however, ignores Auden's genius in using to expose and undermine the anti-Romantic (and anti-aesthetic) style of thinking characterizing Caliban's audience--and Auden's. It ignores Auden's central explanation of the piece, not in terms of what it attempts to represent but in terms of its unusual style performed by an inarticulate creature, Caliban, who speaks by borrowing from Ariel the most artificial style possible: that of the imagination. (2) Speaking the real Word, Caliban gets at the ineffable truth of human existence, the existence of born actors (CP 444). As Edward Mendelson observes, Caliban, in fact, is an artifice that embodies everything that is not an artifice. (3) Like the imagination for which he speaks, Caliban is an irritating, irrefutable, aesthetic entity impossible to deny or silence. In all of these respects, finally, Caliban plays highly Romantic role performing, rather than attempting to represent, the sublime, role this paper will investigate in three, interwoven venues as evidence of Auden's revision of the Romantic sublime. To begin with, as Auden defines it in his study of Romanticism, Enchafed Flood, the ultimate focus of the Romantic poet, who serves as the subject of his poetry, is his journey into himself. Here he finds an unsolved problem, perpetually both a stating and solving of the problem. (4) He finds the begged question of identity inherent in being human, the indeterminate identity there within the poet's consciousness, privy to his thoughts and feelings. discontinuity and dialectical tension that mark Caliban's observations in these ways, align him with what M. H. Abrams defines as the silent human in the greater Romantic lyric. In the tripartite form, that moves from outer to inner and back to outer landscapes, this auditor appears in the inner landscape, the landscape of the poet's thoughts and feelings. …

"We Are Two": The Address to Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey"

FEW READERS DOUBT THE PROMINENCE OF TINTERN ABBEY IN THE Wordsworth canon; yet despite an almost uninterrupted flow of critical interest since 1798, this poem continues to challenge readers to extent Alan Grob has recently described poem as that dark and bloody ground over which so many of battles of Romantic New Historicist historiography have been fought. (1) The contested presence of Tintern Abbey in Wordsworth scholarship oscillates at present between two critical poles: one group considers poem Wordsworth's most articulate expression of egotistical sublime, based on selfish exclusion of anything else might impede his privileged vision into the life of things (49); another reads poem as all-embracing, impassioned ode to joy of wise speaker who has heard and incorporated still, sad music of humanity (92) in his argument. (2) The disparaging critics are outraged by what Wordsworth excludes from his self-aggrandizing prophecy (the poor, Dorothy), while affirmative readers tend to understate how bewildered and disillusioned speaker is in favor of reading which emphasizes abundant recompense. Both disparaging and affirmative critics largely read poem as if it is all about one particular character, an individual Self, closely identified with Wordsworth himself, who tries to come to terms with something, either by ignoring or belittling others, or, put positively, by incorporating Dorothy into his own picture. A reading of poem according to this model makes good sense, particularly since it ties in closely with definition of genre we have come to associate with this kind of romantic poem: Greater Romantic Lyric. In M. H. Abrams' now classic definition speaker starts out in particular landscape, and in sustained colloquy, which parallels meditation triggered by landscape, he achieves an insight, faces up to tragic loss, comes to moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. (3) However, focus on individual in this definition (and in modern readings of romanticism in general) and lack of emphasis on a silent human auditor, present or absent (Abrams 77) have led to certain neglect or an individual-biased reading of final section of Tintern Abbey, address to Dorothy. Not all critics, of course, celebrate or condemn poem without qualification, but even those critics, like Susan J. Wolfson, who recognize tension and almost desperate sense of determination in poem have not elaborated very much on address to Dorothy. (4) Recently, presence of Dorothy in Tintern Abbey has received most attention in an article by James Soderholm, who has pointed out disagreement about Dorothy's place in poem encapsulates positions of major critics of romantic poetry. (5) It may be timely to explore address to Dorothy further by considering generic links of Tintern Abbey and position of Tintern Abbey within Lyrical Ballads volume as whole. The web of interconnection among poems in collection is helpful for our recognition of importance of Dorothy as chosen conversation partner and companion to speaker. Charles Taylor emphasizes how our obsession with individual difference has to some extent ruled out Other: Modern culture has developed conceptions of individualism which picture human person as, at least potentially, finding his or her own bearings within, declaring independence from webs of interlocution which have originally formed him/her, or at least neutralizing them. It's as though dimension of interlocution were of significance only for genesis of individuality, like training wheels of nursery school, to be left behind and to play no part in finished person. (6) I would like to suggest Dorothy's part in Tintern Abbey is not to serve as speaker's nursery training wheels en route to individual selfhood. …

"The First Fire": Barbauld Rewrites the Greater Romantic Lyric

"The First Fire": Barbauld Rewrites the Greater Romantic Lyric

“Le Lac” as Exemplar of the Greater Romantic Lyric

“Le Lac” as Exemplar of the Greater Romantic Lyric