American Romanticism, Again

VIRGINIA JACKSON American Romanticism, Again i. Romantic Lyric T h e d e f in it io n o f “r o m a n t ic is m ” m a y b e (l ik e a l l -is m s ) a m a t t e r of great debate, but little of that debate has had much to do with American poetry. When in 1924 Arthur O. Lovejoy proposed abandoning the term as a literary historical frame, complaining that “the word ‘roman­ tic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing,” nineteenth-century American poetry was not one of those too many things.1 When Rene Wellek responded to Lovejoy in 1949 by arguing that one must conceive of period terms “not as arbitrary linguistic labels nor as metaphysical entities, but as names for systems of norms which dominate literature at a specific time of the historical process,” the norms that domi­ nated American poetry in the nineteenth century were not one of the sys­ tems he had in mind.2 When these founders of the history of ideas and of modern comparative literary study talked about Romanticism, it is safe to assume that they meant European Romanticism, and when AngloAmerican literary critics today continue to talk about Romanticism—or when the upper case noun becomes a lower case adjective (as in, “the ro­ mantic novel,” or, most often, “romantic poetry”), or even when it is shortened to Northrop Frye’s stenographer’s shorthand, “Rcsm,” which as Anahid Nersessian has recently reminded us, was Frye’s unpublished vi­ sion of a Romanticism neither too capacious nor too normative, “a low adjustment utopia”—it is safe to assume that the term refers to the history of ideas that stretched from mid eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ger­ man idealism through late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European national revolutions (especially the French) and that found a literary home in British poetics.3 i. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” in VUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE R o m a n ticism : P o in ts o f V iew , eds. Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1970), 6 6 . 2. Wellek, “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History,” in R o m a n ticism : P o in ts o f V iew , 182. For a lively discussion of both Lovejoy and Wellek and the problem of Romanti­ cism as definition and as period norm, see Frances Ferguson, “On the Numbers of Roman­ ticisms,” E L H 58, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 471—98. 3. Nersessian, U to p ia , L im ited : R o m a n ticism a n d A d ju stm en t (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 21. S iR , 55 (Fall 2016) 319 320 VIRGINIA JACKSON In departments of English, we know that when we talk about Romantic Poetry we don’t just mean Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Shelley and Byron but also Henrans and Scott and Smith and Barbauld and Baillie and Burns and Clare and the list goes on—or at least the list of British, Irish, and Scots poets continues to expand. Roman­ ticists themselves may admit that their original canon was framed by a Paris editor and swiftly republished in Philadephia (and so, as Meredith McGill points out, was transatlantic from the start), or that expressive poetics actu­ ally derived from the Orientalist Sir William Jones’s Sanskrit and Persian translations (and so, as Aamir Mufti points out, was Orientalized from the start), or that the historical coincidence of the emergence of Romanticism and the middle of the Middle Passage was no coincidence (and so, as Edouard Glissant and many others have pointed out, was invested in the emergence of the worst forms of modernity from the start), but those ad­ missions have not made much difference in the way we tell the story of Romanticism and almost no difference in the way we conduct the business of the profession of literary studies.4 When we do speak of American Ro­ manticism, we tend to mean Transcendentalism, and by Transcendental­ ism, we tend to mean Emerson...