Romantic Misfits (review)

Robert Miles begins Romantic Misfits with a "simple sentence" that productively complicates the most clichéd notion about Romanticism that still circulates in popular culture: "Although all Romantics are misfits," he writes, "some misfits did not fit" (1). Miles defines "misfits" in two senses: those writers excluded from literary history in order to establish a Romantic canon, and those writers canonized by virtue of their exclusivity, a misfit status earned as they transcended the literary marketplace, their genius neglected by all but a privileged and discerning few. This moment of Romantic canonization, occurring between "a radical Enlightenment and its reactionary counter" (8), coincided with the disintegration of the public sphere (6); literary culture, Miles contends, came to value original genius and an aesthetic independent of material contingencies and commercial pressures at the expense of broader, more democratic public engagement with the world of letters. Through arguments that are well grounded in period aesthetic theory and literary culture (in particular the satellite industries of publishing and reviewing), Miles's five chapters test this claim.

Chapter 1—on forgeries of Shakespeare produced by William Henry Ireland from 1795 to 1796—squarely proves Miles's thesis. Heavily influenced by Herbert Croft's Love and Madness (a novel composed of forged letters that defended one of the most notorious forgers of the era, Thomas Chatterton), Ireland fashioned himself as an illegitimate trickster who (like Chatterton) rose, "self-propelled, through the force of his own genius" (21). Miles persuasively shows how Ireland's failure to pass off his productions as those of the nation's original genius resulted mainly from the changing nature of the public sphere. With the politicization of belletristic discourse in the 1790s, the "courts of the republic of letters" were increasingly imagined to be unfit—too radicalized—for literary debate; it was thought that only a few connoisseurs and professionals could be trusted to evaluate artistic production (58, 60). Poetic appreciation was no longer "a matter of the free exchange of rational opinions upon literary issues"; it became, rather, "a matter of isolated worship" in which—though acts of the imagination or though careful study of "authentic English originals"—the "spirit of genius" might be apprehended and reproduced (61).

The strongest arguments in the chapter on "Gothic Wordsworth" come towards the end, when Miles proves his case that, while Wordsworth began to "create the 'taste' by which he was to be relished," his readers "in turn instructed Wordsworth in the taste by which he was to become successful" (92). Establishing the extent to which the Gothic, as a literary genre and as an established set of tropes, was deeply engaged in the political projects of the public sphere, Miles links the "decisive shift" in Wordsworth's "ideological outlook" to his "abandonment of the Gothic" (65). In leaving the Gothic behind, Wordsworth "withdraw[s] from the public sphere" and embraces lyric interiority: he abandons criticism of human institutions for close study of human nature (65, 97). This shift, Miles argues, was dictated by a reading public that was increasingly bourgeois, nationalist, and unwilling to become embroiled in the complicated engagements with otherness that Wordsworth's Gothic poetry required (93, 67).

In his third chapter, Miles provocatively juxtaposes Thomas Carlyle's discussions of Sicilian con artist and impresario Count Cagliostro and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, revealing striking similarities in how Carlyle's response to both pits the material against the transcendental. As a transitional figure between the Romantic and Victorian eras, Carlyle's disgust with the material—the body in particular—as he elevates a certain strain of transcendental aesthetic philosophy is especially relevant to a reception study of Romanticism. Miles mines this vein of disgust from Carlyle (directed at Cagliostro and Coleridge) to Coleridge (directed at himself). Like Cagliostro, Coleridge did not fit Carlyle's definition of or need for original, purifying genius; Coleridge's person and personality stood in the way, blinding Carlyle to those elements of the transcendental project that they shared. Coleridge, in turn, found himself, as a poet, unable to...