Romantic Fallacies

As a contribution to a critical debate, this study is an attack, in the tradition of Yvor Winters and F.R. Leavis, on Romanticism in English poetry and criticism. It begins with an outline of the movement in eighteenth-century aesthetic thought that gave rise to several fallacious literary notions, doctrines, and procedures: mythic form, individual authority, inspiration, and dramatic immediacy. The argument moves from an extended critique of Meyer Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism, through an evaluative comparison of William Wordsworth and George Crabbe, to intensive analyses of the critical reputations and poetic weaknesses of those two most definitive of Romantic poems, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale."