Scrutiny of ambiguous syntax, puns, and buried metaphors in key passages reveals a less eclectic, more defined vision than readers have usually recognized in An Essay on Criticism. Its center is an image of Nature that adumbrates various analogies involving expansive energy and limiting boundaries, inspired intention and realized form. Pervading the poem, reappearing in different forms, these analogies define the relationships between Nature and Art, creative process and artistic form, artistry and criticism. Implicit in all such relationships is a further image of creating power’s radiating from God, and of the created being’s attempting to rise back to its “Source, and End” where all seeming discords and divisions are perfectly unified. Pope’s Essay follows this image by asking its reader not just to mediate between apparently opposing critical precepts but to transcend their limits to recognize the unconfined truths that bring precepts into being.

Coleridge’s “Dejection” is an ode rather than a conversation poem. It differs from the eighteenth-century ode and establishes a distinctively Romantic ode in adapting the personal voice, meditative structure, and private subject that Coleridge had developed in the conversation poems, but because Coleridge observed odic decorum it lacks the conversation poem’s controlling characteristic, an initial illusion of artlessness manifested in the pattern of thought, rhythm, syntax, and transitions. The inability of critics to agree whether the speaker of “Dejection” masters his crisis is a consequence of Coleridge’s innovation in employing the device of “simultaneous composition” in a poem of greater seriousness than any of the conversation poems. The speaker cannot plausibly resolve a crisis that affects his life at the root within the span of a single meditation, and because he is enmeshed in the experience as he articulates it, he has no perspective from which to evaluate it.

Though in his criticism Zola welcomed attempts by his contemporaries to abandon traditional forms of the plot, his novels reveal a constant concern for ordered construction. L’Assommoir demonstrates a particularly rigorous unity of design. In its internal organization one can discern a system of interrelated features deriving from a scheme of three controlling structural oppositions that, throughout the novel, character, action, and description illustrate: work/idleness, cleanliness/filth, abstention/indulgence. The development of the plot is the process by which the two principal characters, Gervaise and Coupeau, progressively abandon the positive values of this scheme and submit to the opposite tendencies. Zola traces this process within a symmetrical framework of measured effects and equivalent phases of development organized around the central chapter of the work to form a rigorously structured rising and falling action which adds to a novel of stark, repelling contingencies an engaging formal dimension of harmonious order.

The notion that the meaning of an idea is inseparable from its history is reflected in the way that Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin took recourse to historical categories of thought in their creations of meaning. Sartor Resartus, Culture and Anarchy, portions of The Stones of Venice, and the later volumes of Modern Painters are analyzed to suggest that the distinctive feature of the Victorian mind is not to be found in any of its diverse contents but rather in the way that history is made to function as a formal property of thought. Indeed, whereas Enlightenment and Romantic writers were inclined to locate the ground of intelligibility in forms of transcendence, the Victorians were forced by their sense of the historicity of things to derive their meanings from the world of processes and events, sequences and developments.