( 2 reviews )
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( 17 of 17 found this review helpful ) Posted: Mar 13 2004
M.H. Abrams takes his title from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and though he shines his lamp on that work briefly, for the most part this is a critical study which focuses on the key German and English romantics (philosophers and poets)and certain formal attributes they all shared -- namely a penchant for circular structure (golden age of mans innocence/fall from innocence/redemptive return to the beginning). What is most surprising about this study is how pervasive this circular pattern was in the romantic period. Abrams finds it in virtually every major work of philosophy and poetry in the romantic period. In doing so Abrams does not want to suggest that the romantic movement was any less revolutionary than previously thought but that the movement was a complex one that issued forth great changes in philosophy and literature not so much by inventing new forms but by finding new validity in old forms and patterns. Abrams argues that from the time of the reformation, literature and philosophy were becoming more and more secular and that the western conception of the universe was becoming more and more "mechanized". In his earlier book Mirror and the Lamp Abrams traced the origins of romantic aesthetic theory and in so doing explained how the romantics reinvigorated art and philosophy by offering an "organic" view of the universe to counter the mechanistic view which made man feel less and less at home and more and more alien in his world. In Natural Supenaturalism Abrams elaborates that argument and shows in more detail just how individual romantics sought to resituate man in his universe. The "revolution" initiated by the romantics was not a political one Abrams argues but a cognitive one. True freedom is attained not en masse according to Blake and Wordsworth but in solitude where one learns to see the world as it is. For Abrams Wordsworth is the penultimate romantic(other romantic scholars find Blake to be the more important figure) because his poems offer man a route to personal salvation through a private communion with nature via the imagination. Wordsworth intentionally weds his own story to the story of mans fall from and eventual recovery of grace-- what is revolutionary is that Wordsworth suggests that man must not wait for the apocaplypse to be redeemed but can find redemption in this world and all by way of the sympathetic imagination. In the Preludes Wordsworth offers his own life story (and his own aesthetic theory) which is the story of one mans attempt to wed himself to nature and thus recover the natural affinity he felt for nature as a child albeit in a higher way with greater awareness. For Abrams it is the central story of romanticism and one that has a continuing influence on literary output. Though each romantic made use of the circular pattern, each did so in his own unique way and for scholars the real interest of the book will be in tracing the genesis and studying the particularities of each cosmogony and there are many offered here(Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche......), (Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt....). Wordsworth placed a great emphasis on "memory"--for this was the thing that connected him to that first grace he knew in childhood-- in recovering his own version of paradise and so Abrams finds Proust to be Wordsworth's most direct heir. More generally Abrams finds that the circular pattern first found in classic mythology and the bible as well as in that first western autobiography - -St. Augustine Confessions-- continues to be a powerful model for writers as diverse as TS Eliot(Four Quartets) and DH Lawrence to name just two. Abrams finds the romantic rediscovery and revitalization of this circular pattern to be a key aspect of romanticism and the romantic legacy.
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( 15 of 20 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jun 29 2003
A book that takes no account of women writers, ignores Byron (for which NS was later taken to task), and one that simply predated the New Historicism, the mere fact of NS's academic survival is testament to Abrams' giftedness as a writer and the power of his understanding. Abrams deals with a few very large concepts that were important to the Romantic poets in England and Germany (most especially Wordsworth--the concept of the life-cycle in the Prelude and the Prospectus to the Recluse, for instance). These concepts are close-read out of key passages from the poets, then backgrounded in contemporary philosophy and biblical study. Abrams' title, borrowed from Carlyle, with whom he also deals, suggests the largest thesis of his book: that Romanticism was an assimilative movement--one that incorporated, in secular form, Judaeo-Christian ideas and ideals. He extends this definition of Romanticism to Stevens and Proust, thereby redefining Romanticism's legacy as well. The Kunstleroman--the growth of the artist's mind--is, for Abrams, the great secularized Biblical "high argument" of the early 19th century, and one thinks almost immediately of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as the literary heir to this Romantic innovation. Along the way there is much talk of circles and spirals and patterns, and the book's agenda is itself incorporated into its structure--a manipulative move, perhaps, and a critically antiquated one, but it does make for enjoyable and easy reading. The same cannot be said for many of the landmark works of Romantic criticism that followed--and while those works must be read, and NS must therefore be relegated to the category of "old school" criticism, this book will continue to withstand paradigm shifts in humanities research because it is one of those rare works of scholarship that's actually fun. Read with an eye to more recent trends in literary criticism, but do read.
