Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. - book reviews

Criticism, Summer, 1999 by Robert J. Griffin

Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem by Michael O'Neill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xlv 308. $75.00.

Michael O'Neill's subject, stated on the first page of his Introduction, is "poetry that displays awareness of itself as poetry" (xiii). The book's thesis is less straightforwardly presented but the various components are in view by the Introduction's end some thirty pages later. Self-reflexivity in poetry is an index of aesthetic achievement, and this feature or quality is discovered in the canonical six male poets of the early nineteenth century (on the authority of Helen Vendler an engagement with gender issues is politely declined). Romantic poetry differs from earlier examples of self-conscious poetry (two sonnets of Shakespeare and a poem of Marvell's are the only examples), and bequeaths this difference to post-Romantic poets such as Yeats, Stevens, Auden, and Amy Clampitt, a few of whose works are discussed in an extended three-chapter coda. It is not clear what "post-Romantic" means because the definition--it implies "affinity with and distance from Romanticism" (237)--tells us nothing, especially since earlier we were told that Keats's induction to The Fall of Hyperion ushers in post-Romantic reflexiveness (219). The "problem of coverage" (xxxviii) is solved by means of the touchstone method. Sections of poems, sometimes a line or two, in a few cases readings of whole poems such as "Resolution and Independence" and "The Sensitive Plant"--all are offered "as examples of what is finest in their overall achievement" (xxxix). It is important to note that the argument has a polemical purpose. In putting forward a "refreshed" (xxxvi) sense of Romantic aesthetic achievement, O'Neill wants to show that the recent approaches of historical contextualization and ideological critique, specifically Jerome McGann's, are misguided and betray what is most valuable in Romantic poetry. O'Neill intends "to give respect where respect is due--to the art and vocation of poetry" (xliv).

The eleven chapters, all of which have been published separately, do not yield to summary or paraphrase. Touchstone method aside, the coverage is spotty and gives an impression of arbitrariness: twenty-one pages are devoted to ranging over Blake's entire work, but twenty-five of sixty pages on Shelley are devoted to one poem. One poem each by Yeats and Stevens is discussed. Book Five of The Prelude, on books of course, is not mentioned, while a section of The Excursion is offered as a defense of that work. What motivates the selection in each case? A loose, intuitive "taxonomy" (xxvii) of three very indistinct kinds of self-conscious poetry is sketched out in a few pages of the Introduction, but apparently this taxonomy is not an organizing principle and one forgets it entirely until we are reminded that it exists on page 125. There are fine isolated insights that show that O'Neill is closely attuned to the movement of a poetic line, but the internal structure of the book is barely in evidence. O'Neill's topic and his polemical purpose require theoretical and methodological expertise, but this is not his strong point, and the book will not convince by force of sensitive readings loosely connected to a central claim. The thesis is less a fully worked out and substantiated argument than it is an ethos or a statement of faith, something along the lines of "literature never did betray the heart that loved her."

The case against O'Neill is formidable. He appears to be blithely unaware of critics who have systematically taken up the topic of self-reflexivity before him. One thinks immediately, for instance, of Lucien Dallenbach's The Mirror in the Text (1977), which is mostly about narrative, but its typology of raise en abyme would have been a useful starting point. For instance, it would have provided a framework for O'Neill's observation on the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo, that his speech "thematizes and provides a correlative for Shelley's relation to his own poem" (139), and it would have stimulated the identification of other examples. Neil Hertz's subtle analysis of specular moments in which he charts what he calls an "end of the line" structure, several of them from The Prelude, might have figured usefully as well. It is possible that, had O'Neill investigated the scholarship, he might have found things that would have added substance to his case, but that case would have had to be taken up on a more advanced level of discourse. As it is, O'Neill's polemic against historical criticism is both misdirected and incoherent. It is typical of this book that when it addresses the issue of "evaluation" it turns instinctively to Ivor Winters and Leavis rather than to Barbara Herrnstein Smith on aesthetic value and John Guillory's comprehensive critique of Smith in Cultural Capital (1993). The interesting question, at least for me, is whether aesthetic approaches can be integrated with historical ones, whether we can describe the ways in which they are bound up with or indispensable to one another, and Guillory's book is one instance that opens up further serious thinking.