Politics of Romantic Poetry

The major achievement of critics of Romanticism over the past twenty years has been to transfer to the word history the glamour that once routinely attached itself to the word imagination. But all through this period, and more forcibly in recent years, this position has been challenged by others who have argued that the poems are not usefully described simply as historical documents, and that the pleasures they offer are distinct from those to be found in the examination of newspapers, acts of parliament, or economic treatises. One group of critics focuses on the historical circumstances out of which the poems were produced; the other on the language out of which the poems are made. Richard Cronin argues that the opposition between the two approaches is both false and constrictive, and he does so by taking as his premises that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language, and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style. This book describes poets who speak to a fragmented society with the design of constituting their readers as citizens of, in an echo of Wordsworth's phrase, the pure commonwealth, and it takes seriously Wordsworth's further contention that such a commonwealth can be secured only by the purity of its language.