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On Reading Romantic Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

L. J. Swingle
L. J. Swingle*
Affiliation:
University of Washington Seattle
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Abstract

Readers often mistakenly treat Romantic poetry as a poetry of doctrine. It is predominantly a poetry of question, asking rather than telling. Like Descartes in his Meditations, the Romantic poet searches for certainty, employing the test of doubt, submitting supposed certainties to question. As with Descartes, the search leads into the realm of mental activity. But unlike Descartes, the Romantic poet finds further questions here: Cogito, but in what ways does man think? Romantic poetry has two main movements. First, the poetry works in several ways to expose doctrine to question, suspending a reader's sense of certainty. Next, the poetry explores what underlies doctrine, the basic data of mental experience from which doctrine is constructed. These movements establish a number of patterns in the poetry. The Romantic poet does not find certainty, but this failure is the poetry's success: it challenges man's ability to construct doctrine out of the data of experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , October 1971 , pp. 974 - 981
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Notes

Note 1 in page 981 On the epistemological problem, see Earl R. Wasserman, “The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge,” SIR, 4 (1964), 17–34. See also Robert Langbaum's Introduction to his study, The Poetry of Experience (New York: Random, 1957). There is no extended study of skepticism in Wordsworth. For Coleridge, one gets some help from James D. Boulger's “Christian Skepticism in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” pp. 439–52, in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965). A good introduction to Byron's skepticism is E. W. Marjarum's Byron as Skeptic and Believer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1938). On Keats, see C. D. Thorpe's The Mind of John Keats (New York: Russell & Russell, 1926), and Jack Stillinger's “The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' ” SP, 58 (1961), 533–55. The basic study of Shelley's skepticism is C. E. Pulos' The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Skepticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Neb. Press, 1954); see also Donald H. Reiman's Shelley's “The Triumph of Life”: A Critical Study (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), esp. pp. 100–07 and 110–16.

Note 2 in page 981 See my article, “Answers to Blake's ‘Tyger’: A Matter of Reason or of Choice?” Concerning Poetry, 2 (1969), 61–71.

Note 3 in page 981 I have in mind here William Empson's remarks about “Tintern Abbey” in his Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed., rev. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953), pp. 151–52. Empson's approach to Wordsworth's poem is a classic illustration of the condemnatory error: “Wordsworth seems to have believed in his own doctrines and wanted his readers to know what they were. It is reasonable, then, to try to extract from this passage [ll. 88–102] definite opinions on the relations of God, man, and nature, and on the means by which such relations can be known.”

Note 4 in page 981 I have used the following editions of the poetry: The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965); The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–49); The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912); The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956); The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1905); The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).

Note 5 in page 981 Pp. 138, 148 of the Biographia Literaria, Everyman ed., ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1956). The Keats quotation is from Keats's letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (3 May 1818); the italics are mine. The Wordsworth quotations are from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, p. 395 in Vol. ii of the Poetical Works: the italics are mine.

Note 6 in page 981 From Meditation i, 199, in Descartes' Philosophical Writings, selected and edited by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1952).

Note 7 in page 981 Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell ; from the first “Memorable Fancy.”

Note 8 in page 981 Keats's letter to Reynolds (3 May 1818).

Note 9 in page 981 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815), p. 410 in Vol. ii of the Poetical Works.