BOOKS
149
HEGEL,-htHas!
REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM .
By Howard Mumford Jones.
Harvard University Press . $15 .00 .
SHELLEY : TH E GOLDEN YEARS .
By Kenneth Neill Cameron.
Harvard University Press. $20.00.
NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM .
By M.H. Abrams . W.W. Norton.
$10 .00.
POLITICS IN ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY.
By Carl Woodring.
Harvard University Press. $10.00 .
In what seems to me the finest study of Wordsworth yet pub.
Iished, Geoffrey Hartman had occasion to remark, on his final page , that
"political fears .. . are really imaginative fears ."
It
was a comment that
possessed a curious kind of ambiguity. For although the context of the remark
suggested that Hartman meant it to apply only to Wordsworth's
own
political
fears in his declining years, the very nature of Hartman 's approach through–
out
Wordsworth's Poetry
1787- 1814 was to relegate the social and political
aspects of experience entirely to the realm of personal consciousness : "My
own work . .. attempt[ sJ to present a new and comprehensive view of
Wordsworth 's 'consciousness about consciousness .'"
Wordsworth 's Poetry
appeared in 1964 and marked a major advance in
our ability to come to grips with some of the central problems posed by that
loose , baggy term, "tomanticism. " And two years later, in a work of compar–
able brilliance (and a good deal more elegance) , Richard Poirier made even
clearer that a genuine revolution in methodology had taken place-at least for
those readers who were capable of understanding it . "Let us .. . assume with
Hegel ," Poirier wrote in the opening pages of
A World Elsewhere,
..
that
'freedom' is a creation not of political institutions but of consciousness, that
freedom is that reality which the consciousness creates for itself. "
Like most such revolutions in methodology, this one too was effected by
the surest means yet devised to persuade : the demonstration , in the critical
act itself, of a greater justice and precision than had hitherto been thought
possible . (The larger question of the relationship of this revolution to the
