BOOKS
139
THE ROMANTIC AGONY
WORDSWORTH'S POETRY 1787-1814. By Geoffrey H. Hartman.
Yal.
University Pr,ess.
$8.50.
It
was
A.
C. Bradley who-in reaction to Arnold and the
whole nineteenth-century tradition-first called attention from Word–
worth's lyrics and "nature poetry" to what he called the "visionary" and
"apocalyptic" passages of
The Prelude.
He discovered a movement in
Wordsworth not only beyond nature but
against
it. We can look at Geof–
frey Hartman's challenging book as an extension of Bradley's insight
into a full-scale reading of Wordsworth's career. He aims to write the
history of a "supervening consciousness, which Wordsworth names
Imagination in
Prelude V
1"
and which Hartman defines as
U
conscious–
ness of self raised to apocalyptic pitch."
But the critical consensus since
Bradley has changed drastically. Wordsworth is no longer merely
Nature's Boswell, and nothing has received more ample justice in recent
years than the "visionary" side of the Romantic poets. Under the
influence of Northrop Frye's critical theory and his study of Blake some
critics have even identified the essence of romanticism with myth–
making, the creation of wholly self-subsistent worlds beyond nature and
obedient only to the laws of the poetic imagination.
Hartman shares much with these critics. He shares their interest in
the later work of Blake, for both its mythic autonomy and its apocalyptic
energy. By temperament he is disposed usually to begin his exegesis with
a quest for genre if not for archetype. And he describes English roman–
ticism as "a renascence of the Renaissance: a return to the spirit of
Spenser and Milton, to their redemption of imaginative thought wher–
ever it is found."
Yet much as Hartman admires Milton's "analogical and myth–
making imagination" and Spenser's "unashamed direct exercise of the
poetical faculty," he is fully aware of the ambivalence of the Romantics
toward their great forebears, which-especially in Keats and Words–
worth-is really an ambivalence toward the visionary mode itself. In
practice they admired and did otherwise. One of the emblems of this
book
is the "mutilated bower" of "Nutting," a poem
in
which Words–
worth describes a
rite de passage
through the bower of Spenserian and
pastoral Romance, toward "a sense of pain" that is associated with self–
hood and consciousness, a transformation even more explicit in the
poems of Keats. Each time Hartman evokes Milton and Spenser as
models, he immediately rebounds to make the crucial distinctions. After
