In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

438 BOOK REVIEWS affects (appreciation, thankfulness, gratitude, humility)” can quietly emerge apart from “the logic of mutuality” (128). Interestingly, the section on “Frost at Midnight” is one of the few moments where Romantic Intimacy explicitly addresses extant political renderings of its particular Romantic canon. Yousefis fully cognizant ofthe unsettling implications of Dorothy’s silence in “Tintern Abbey” and Sara’s abstraction in “Eolian Harp” (12627 ), or the politics of utility in “Old Cumberland Beggar” (91), and she is careful to note that “[t]he sense that self-involvement precludes, or seeks to evade, engagement with communal and civic life only duplicates the rigid opposition between solitude and sociality that a poem such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ interrogates” (123). As rejoinders go, this is entirely reasonable, and left me wondering what Yousef’s dexterous argument about the com­ plicities of mute presence would look like in more explicitly political set­ tings, such as Wordsworth’s “September 1, 1802,” with its supremely awk­ ward silence around the sonnet’s black female refugee. This is to say, there is a certain insularity to Romantic Intimacy that isn’t surprising given its method and critical program: it reconsiders a range of highly canonical Romantic texts we thought we knew, and attunes us to the strangeness of that knowledge. Scott J. Juengel Vanderbilt University Andrew Warren. The Orient and the Young Romantics. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 279. $99. The answers Andrew Warren offers to the question with which he begins this book—why did the young Romantics so often set their poems in the Orient or in Orientalized settings—are doubly pitched toward a poetics of Lacanian mirrors that refract self and world and the political moment of post-Terror Romanticism. These features of Romanticism in its second phase (and, arguably, soon into its first) are complexly and valuably joined in this book. For if the figure of the Oriental despot repeats, at a seemingly safe cultural distance, the solipsism that the Romantic interiority of being necessarily risks, despotism and a putatively “Oriental” fatalism together constitute the political predicament of liberal Romanticism, even as the threat of global likeness makes conservative Romantics edgy. For the sec­ ond Romantic generation, Warren contends, a poetics caught or entangled in the mirror imaginings of the poetic self as exile, foreigner, and other is enmeshed in a political impasse whose Orientalized name is “despotism,” but whose political contours look more like the impossible inheritance, SiR, 54 (Fall 2015) BOOK REVIEWS 439 post revolution, of a social contract that is flawed (or inevitable) in the same way that the figure of the solitary poet who would change the world is flawed. Both, this book suggests, figure in the political imaginary of Romantic poets and nation states and become the troubled and reworked poetic ground for Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. For this second generation, Warren insists, multiple ironies, a virtual hall of mirrored ironies, mark their poetic, imagined “Orient” in ways that presage Edward Said’s analysis of the Orientalism of Western writers as it­ self a phantasmatic, over-decorated fiction. The difficulty of separating what the Orient is or was from the way it was Orientalized is from this vantage point as much a Romantic problem as it would become Said’s and ours. What Warren’s study brings to scholarly understanding of Romantic Orientalism is a more critically poised recognition of how the second generation understood, rather sharply, the ricochet effect of projecting their poetic and political anxieties onto an Oriental scene that re­ fracted their own dubieties. The shape of Warren’s argument helps to make its double impact effec­ tive. A fine introduction considers the rhetorical and figurative impulses of Romantic Orientalism: a tendency to invoke earlier texts as pre-texts, a predisposition to worry about solipsism as both a poetic condition and globally untenable, and a recognition, philosophical and poetic, ofbelated­ ness. These features mark Warren’s analysis of Wordsworth’s famous Dream of the Arab, and the post-Wordsworthian echoes of that episode. Subsequent chapters feature astute readings of poems by Shelley, Byron, and Keats that emphasize the difficulty of arriving at an external perspec­ tive. Being entangled with...

pdf

Share