BOOKS
151
all of the difficulties now residing in their chosen subjects. Carl Woodring, it
is true, does refer to his intention to treat" poems as final, self-authenticating
objects ofstudy and admiration" -and who of us would want to quarrel with
such an aim? But the nature of Woodring's cautious organization (in part
suggested by the" in" of his title: politics
in
poetry) results, rather sadly, in a
much smaller book than we might otherwise have hoped for.
I say "sadly" because there are so many things to respect in
Politics in
English Romantic Poetry:
the vast amounts of exact scholarship, the isolated
perceptions of real sensitivity, the general willingness to confront a very wide
range of early nineteenth-century English literature on its own terms. Yet
each of these virtues is diminished seriously by the absence of any real organ–
izing vision. What might have been a genuinely exciting study, commensu–
rate with the potential of its subject, becomes only one more serviceable vol–
ume in an ever-proliferating sea of specialized "topics."
Yet if
Politics in English Romantic Poetry
may be said to have attempted
too little in terms of the learning it displays, Howard Mumford Jones's
Revolution andRomanticism
clearly has attempted too much. "This book is
not for specialists," Jones announces in his preface-and that seems unex–
ceptionable enough. Probably there have been far too many books for
"specialists" in the past twenty years, and far too few of any real quality for a
general audience. But when an author announces in 1974 that" the romantic
moi"
has been taken as "a central theme" in his attempt to work out the
relations berween revolution and romanticism, I think we're entitled as
readers to form certain (unspecialized) expectations concerning the kind of
intellectual sophistication necessary for the discourse. And, quite clearly, that
kind of sophistication isn't there on any sustained level. Thus we read of
Wordsworth's poetry at one point that'
'The Prelude
is one of the great intro–
spective triumphs of romanticism, a large part of it turning on the poet's
varying attitude toward the French revolution"; and at another that "the
Wordsworth ian paradox is that one of the most subjective of romantic writers
was throughout his life deeply concerned with public issues." Yet little of this
kind of generalization carries much weight, for there really hasn't been a
sufficiently informed attempt by Jones to confront the crux of the issue raised
by his title: the problematic relationship berween individual consciousness
(particularly as we find it reflected in literary art) and the period's major social
and political changes.
With Meyer Abrams'
Natural Supernaturalism,
however, we do have a
book-the only one of the four under review, in fact-in which we can find a
genuine awareness of the very large difficulties inherent in the subject .
Moreover, Abrams' study has an organizing concept behind it which permits
enormous masses of material to take on an illuminating interrelationship.
