Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. - book reviews

Criticism, Summer, 1999 by Robert J. Griffin

O'Neill does not like historicist critiques because they demystify art to get at its social implications. What he misses, in my view, is the extent to which historical criticism is a methodological version of self-awareness, ostensibly his subject. He dissents from McGann's ideological critique, but does not take seriously enough McGann's explication and adoption of Bakhtin in "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism" (1979). Thus the whole issue of historical awareness and historical difference gets submerged, or rendered trivial, in a view of aesthetics which celebrates the fact of art or the skill of the artist to the exclusion of any other consideration.

Actually, I would argue, any account of artistic achievement must rely, wittingly or not, on some form of historical explanation. For if a wide range of language uses may include the poetic function in Jakobson's sense, then it follows that what counts as Literature in a specific place and time is defined by more than the properties of its language. The issue is thrown into relief especially in claims for change or difference. Thus, O'Neill opens his book with a familiar gesture in much Romantic criticism, the assertion that Romantic poetry is different and original. Yet, as we see shortly afterwards, difference and originality must be asserted in historical-cultural terms:

   Romantic poetry is a poetry that is creating the taste by which it might be
   enjoyed, in part a consequence of a shift away from patronage to the more
   impersonal laws governing the marketplace. Yet enquiry into possible
   socio-economic determinants of Romantic self-consciousness is not my
   concern. Instead I concentrate on its continued literary value. (xxii)

The idea that "socio-economic determinants" might actually be part of the content of the self-consciousness of a Romantic poet, and that a response to these things might also be in some way constitutive of "literary value" rather than opposed to it, apparently never occurred to O'Neill.

In fact, O'Neill never investigates or substantiates his claim for a "significant difference" (xiii) in Romantic poetry; he points to only a few instances in two writers before the Romantic period (dismissing the eighteenth century entirely), whereas it could be easily argued that writers have traditionally used devices such as ekphrasis or other forms of raise en abyme to signal heightened moments in their texts. So what is the difference? How define it? Are we dealing with the development of a technique, similar to the increasing occurrence of free indirect discourse in prose fiction? One would want to know, to take one example, what exactly the difference is between the quality of self-reflexivity in Pope's Windsor Forest (Earl Wasserman's reading of the Lodona episode would be a point of departure) as opposed to what one finds in Romantic poetry. But that sort of inquiry could only be carried out by means of historical or literary-historical explanation. Self-consciousness in poetry is not simply the deployment of the traditional devices by which art foregrounds, and at times indeed demystifies, its own procedures, medium, or condition of enunciation. It also involves with these devices the writer's engagement with pressing contemporary issues, broadly cultural when not specifically political. If O'Neill took seriously his own observation about Shelley, that the poet is "increasingly conscious that he does not write in a cultural, generic, or historical vacuum" (141), then his differences with "politically correct critics who think that systems of social relations hold a poet's pen" (210) might have been productive of more than mere caricature.