Romanticism Reconsidered [antikvár]

FOREWORD this book consists oL Lour papers read at the English Institute in September, 1962, under my chairmanship. The four contributions are entirely independent of one another, and whatever similarity there may be, such as the fact that the first three papers all quote the same passage from Wordsworth, is pure accident. Consequently the resemblances among them, and the unity which they present, is all the more significant. The anti-Romantic movement in criticism, which in Britain and America followed the Hulme-Eliot-Pound broadsides of the early twenties, is now over and done with, and criticism has got its sense of literary tradition properly in focus again. That this movement should ever have had so much authority is an impressive negative tribute to the coherence of critical theory in our time. There are a few references to the movement in my own paper, which is intended to serve as a general introduction both to the topic and to the three papers that follow. But it was not the influence of this movement which was the main reason for holding a session on the subject of "Romanticism Reconsidered" at this date. The main reason was to examine the degree of real content which the term Romanticism has. It is a datum of literary