- Romantic literary criticism was developed by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in works like Lyrical Ballads and Biographia Literaria. - They shifted attention from poetry reflecting reality to the poet's expression of emotions and relationship to their work. Poetry became an expressive rather than mimetic art. - Romantic critics like Wordsworth and Coleridge were also poets who produced the new Romantic poetry and wrote essential commentaries explaining their creative practices.

1. Romantic Literary Criticism
Wordsworth and Coleridge
• Lyrical Ballads (1800)
• Biographia Literaria (1817)
Jimma University
College of Social Science and Humanities
Department of English Language and Literature

2. English literary criticism of the
Romantic era
• most closely associated with the writings of
William Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical
Ballads (1800) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
his Biographia Literaria (1817)
• Disagreement among modern critics as to
whether their view shows major break with
the criticism of their predecessors

3. Lyrical Ballads
• In 1800, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,
Wordsworth issued his famous proclamation
about the nature of poetry as “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings.”
• With this statement, Wordsworth shifted the
center of attention from the work as a reflection
or imitation of reality to the artist, and the
artist's relationship to the work.

4. • Poetry would henceforth be considered an
expressive rather than a mimetic art.
• Although the analogy of art as a mirror was still
used, M. H. Abrams reports that the early
Romantics suggested that the mirror was turned
inward to reflect the poet's state of mind, rather
than outward to reflect external reality.

5. • William Hazlitt in his “On Poetry in
General” (1818) addressed the changes in
this analogy “by combining the mirror
with a lamp, in order to demonstrate that
a poet reflects a world already bathed in
an emotional light he has himself
projected,” according to Abrams.
• Additionally, music replaced painting as
the art form considered most like poetry
by the Romantics.

6. • Abrams explains that the German writers of
the 1790s considered music “to be the art
most immediately expressive of spirit and
emotion,”
• English Romantics' believed that the poet was
a member of a special breed, “exalted beyond
any other human being.”

7. • The Romantic poet/critic thus began to
produce criticism that explained and justified
not only creativity itself, but also his own
creative practices, even his own poetry.
• T. S. Eliot reports, for example, that
“Wordsworth wrote his Preface to defend his
own manner of writing poetry, and Coleridge
wrote the Biographia to defend Wordsworth's
poetry, or in part he did.”

8. • Paul A. Cantor, in his study of twentieth-
century attacks on Romantic criticism,
acknowledges the self-serving quality of the
image put forth by Romantic poets who saw
themselves as isolated and inspired geniuses
possessed of special gifts unavailable to the
masses.

9. • According to this image, explains Cantor, “the
artist stands above society as a prophetic
visionary, leading it into the future, while free of
its past and not engaged in its present activities.
• Wordsworth argued that there should be no
difference between the language of prose and
that of poetry, thus defending his use, within
the Lyrical Ballads, of the everyday language of
the middle and lower classes.

10. • Wordsworth associated poetic diction with
artifice and aristocracy and his own poetic
language with nature and democracy.
• Romantic critics were far ahead of their time,
anticipating the work of various late twentieth-
century thinkers. One example is provided by
Kathleen M. Wheeler, who states that
“Coleridge's concept of polarity, of opposition, is
in many ways anticipatory of Derrida's concept of
difference …

11. • Romantic literary critics were poets
themselves. “They not only produced the new
poetry but the essential commentaries upon
it,” according to Parrinder.

12. Coleridge Vs Wordsworth
• Wimsatt and Brooks write that “Wordsworth's
primitivism was part of a general reaction,
setting in well before his own day, against the
aristocratic side of neo-classicism.”
• But where Wordsworth associated poetic diction
with artifice and aristocracy and his own poetic
language with nature and democracy,
• Coleridge saw the issue differently. “To Coleridge
it seemed more like an issue between propriety
and impropriety, congruity and incongruity.
• In effect he applied the classic norm of decorum,”
according to Wimsatt and Brooks.

13. Coleridge Vs Wordsworth
• Coleridge's critical theories also differ from
Wordsworth's in that they are heavily grounded
in theology.
• Sometimes, particularly in his later writings
according to Timothy Corrigan, the theological
overwhelms the literary.
• “What is most peculiar about his work during this
period is the unusual extent to which he
disregards the primary text and how completely
his complex theological models and language
usurp that text,” contends Corrigan.

14. Some Remarks
• Romanticism was a revolt against aristocratic
social and political norms of the Age of
Enlightenment and a reaction against the
scientific rationalization of nature.
• Romanticism validated strong emotion as an
authentic source of aesthetic experience,
placing new emphasis on such emotions as
trepidation, horror and terror and awe.

15. • Romanticists had a persistent interest in the
medieval literature, such as epics, ballads,
which were not restricted by various kinds of
classical rules and were characterized by rich
imagination, strong emotion and free
expression.
• Romanticists took interest in the strange and
the mysterious as opposed to common sense.

16. • Romanticists showed a profound admiration and
love for nature.
• The leading Romantic writers include Blake,
Wordsworth, Scott, Shelly and Keats in England.
• Capitalist industrialization brought sufferings and
poverty to the working class. As a protest against
the industrial revolution, romantic writers looked
to the Middle Ages and to direct contact with
nature, wanting to return to the simpler life of
the past.

17. Realism Vs Romanticism
• In the second half of the 19th century, “Realism"
was offered as a polarized opposite to
Romanticism.
• Romanticism elevated the achievements of what
it perceived as heroic individualists and artists,
whose pioneering examples would elevate
society.
• It also legitimized the individual imagination as a
critical authority, which permitted freedom from
classical notions of form in art.

18. Q & A
• What does Parrinder’s remark about romantic Critics signify
when he states, “They not only produced the new poetry
but the essential commentaries upon it” ?
• Which one of the following does not represent romantic
literary criticism?
A. Reaction to the restraints and rules imposed by
neo/classicists
B. Idealization of the life of a capitalist society
C. Nostagia for middles ages
D. Emphasis on subjective idealism and emotional
expression.