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PARTISAN REVIEW
earlier work of Georges Poulet is a problem for another kind of review.) Thus
Hartman's approach really did give us die grounds for experiencing a larger
Wordsworth than we had known before; Poirier's analysis of certain key
passages of American prose enlarged their significance in a fashion that can
only be called revelatory . And different as the organization of each book was
in almost every other respect, both did share a similar energizing discrimina–
tion at their center: a conception ofliterary art as a verbal process which could
be defined most surely by the boundaries of individual consciousness. A
peculiar kind of appropriateness resided, therefore, in the remark with which
Harold Bloom opened his introduction to
Romanticism and Consciousness
in
1970-that "subjectivity or self-consciousness is the salient problem of
Romanticism"-for the pronouncement bore all the assurance of a critical
movement in the process of institutionalizing itself.
Coincidentally enough, however, in the same year that Bloom's collec–
tion of essays appeared, Carl Woodring was attempting to reopen a question
that has always posed an implicit problem for the study of romanticism-the
issue of the relationship during the period between political events and
literary art. "The operative thesis of the present study," Woodring wrote in
his introduction to
Politics in English Romantic Poetry,
"is that political
concern is more important as a generative force and an argumentative
presence in the romantic movement in England, and in major poems of that
movement, than one could gather from most criticism of the last fifty years . ' ,
It
was a contention composed-roughly-of two parts rhetoric, three
parts sheer truth. For although the literature ofEnglish romanticism has never
really lacked for political readings, Woodring's book does help to throw into
clearer relief the methodological difficulty which has plagued the subject since
at least the time ofFrancisJeffrey, s declaration in 1816 that' 'the revolution in
our literature" was causally related to "the agitations of the French revolu-
tion.' ,
The difficulty, of course (and it's one that few critics have really con-
fronted), is to discover precisely how this apparent causal relationship can be
I
demonstrated within the confines of responsible literary criticism. To para-
phrase Bloom's pronouncement of 1970, the salient problem of romanticism
is not so much self-consciousness
per se,
but rather the methodological dif·
ficulty of transcending the limitations that a conception of self-consciousness
has imposed upon the criticism of romanticism. And to state the problem in
this fashion is to indicate, I think, tbat the furthest reach of the literary
criticism ofromanticism in our own time has still been unable to pass beyond
the philosophic exactitude (and idealized rationality) of an Hegelian
construct .
Yet three of the four books under review scarcely reveal any awareness at
