That Deep Romantic Chasm: Some Recent Critical Currents

Review Article That Deep Romantic Chasm: Some Recent Critical Currents V.A. DELUCA Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer, editors. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1986. 246 Arden Reed, editor. Romanticism and LAnguage Ithaca: Cornell University Press '984. 327 David Fite. Harold Bloom: The RhetoricofRomantic Vision Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press 1985. xiv, 230 Angela Leighton. Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984. x, '95 Kenneth R. Johnston. Wordsworth and 'The Recluse' New Haven: Yale University Press 1984. xxxi, 397 Louis Crompton. Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England Berkeley: University of California Press 1985. xiii, 4'9 Jean H. Hagstrum. The Romantic Body:Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth and Blake Knoxville, Tenn: University of Tennessee Press 1985. xvi, 177 For the past generation Romanticism has occupied a place of special prestige in literary studies, similar to that enjoyed by the Metaphysical poets in the days of the New Critics. In the 19605, with remarkable success, critics such as Harold Bloom turned their passionate advocacy of the Romantic poets into an overt campaign to overthrow the New Critical hegemony and indeed the entire Modernist enterprise, replacing them with a restored poetic succession of 'visionary' or 'apocalyptic' humanism. In more recent years criticism has moved into a sceptical, demythicizing mode, but the antinomian radicalism of much leading critical thought and the frequent flamboyance of its expression remain well within UNIVEKSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1987 576 v. A. DE LUCA the Romantic orbit. Not coincidentally; the most celebrated critics of OUf day, the so·called Yale post-structuralists, did their most influential work on Romantic figures - Bloom on Blake and Shelley, Geoffrey Hartman on Wordsworth, the late Paul de Man on the Coleridgean theory of symbolism, their French ally Derrida on Rousseau. Even when such critics aim to subvert the Romantics' own selfdefinitions (as in the case of de Man's famous deconstruction of the ostensibly 'sacramental' vision of Coleridge and Wordsworth), they merely continue the same discourse against closure and empirical positivism instituted by the Romantics in the first place. In addition, the imagery of the Romantic Sublime lives again in the deconstructionists' vocabulary of voids, chasms, labyrinths, abysses, and infinite regress. Hence, while conservative kinds of study continue to flourish - as some of t~e works surveyed in this essay show - a dominant critical sensibility that is Romantic in certain crucial emphases significantly animates the many books in the field that appear each year. One of these books, as its title indicates, tackles the issue of criticism head-on. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer's collection Romanticismand Contemporary Criticism, an outgrowth of a seminar at the University of New Mexico, contains essays by Northrop Frye, W.j.T. Mitchell, j. Hillis Miller, M.H. Abrams, and the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and is particularly interesting for its inclusion ofedited transcripts of lively question-and-answer sessions between the students and the contributors. Cavell's essay, on Romantic poems as 'texts of recovery,' is generous in spirit but ruminative and rather unfocused in treatment. Equally generous, hospitable to all modes of criticism including, here, deconstruction , Frye's contribution on 'The Survival of Eros' is to be welcomed for its characteristic humane urbanity, even though the ideas are essentially restatements of positions that Frye formulated long ago. A sense of dejil vu also hangs over the pieces of Abrams and Miller but of a different sort. Abrams's piece is largely an attack on Miller's, a deconstructive reading of'A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal,' and there is a postscript by Miller in response to Abrams. The two have been going at one another in print for well over a decade now, ever since Miller in a 1972 review put to the question the humanistic premises of Abrams's monumental Natural Supernaturalism, and by this time there is little new to be said on either side of the debate. In the present instance, Abrams perhaps concedes both too much and not enough; his reading of 'A Slumber' as a 'beautiful' meditation on human death and living Nature does not admit sufficiently...