A Critical History of English Literature IV. [antikvár]

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Romantic Poets I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge The middle of the eighteenth century was (as earlier chapters have indicated) a period of transition and experiment in poetic styles and subjects, and it is interesting to see how the view of poetry as the refined and pleasing communication to educated ears of an_^s-pect^if_civiii^ed and generalized humanity seems to be abandoned iiTpractice" long before TTTs officially discarded by the critics. It would be a mistake, however, to diagnose all poets who show a stronger personal feeling or a passionate interest in the old and the odd and the unique as "pre-romantics" who point forward to a liberation of poetry which takes place in a violent poetic revolution at the end of the century. Shifts in the view of the nature and function of poetry proceed gradually and continuously, and the movement from the view that poetry is essentially "imitation" of human nature, in a general or ideal or deliberately synthesized or centralized or universalized sense, for the dual purpose of pleasing and edifying, and that the test of a work of literature is the degree to which it communicates its "imitation," with pleasure and edification, to its audience, to the view that poetry has for its major function the expression of the poet's emotion and that the relation of the poem to the poet is more significant than its relation to its audience—such a movement proceeds in a variety of ways throughout the century, and indeed one can sometimes see a mimetic and an expressive view of poetry held simultaneously, as in Dr. Johnson, who most strenuously urges that poetry should imitate human nature and also reproves Milton because "Lycidas" does not seem to be the overflow of genuine passion. The attitude of the self-styled Augustan age of Queen Anne was scarcely estabUshed as an attitude (and one which contained contradictory elements) before it began to be modified 856