Romanticism (It's All in the Name...)

Three books, all with the same title, Romanticism, deal with the same topic. Indeed, all employ the same key word in discussing the art and philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet each of the books' three authors, Aiden Day, David Blayney Brown, and Michael Ferber, understand the term "Romanticism" in slightly different ways.

Day's work, published as a part of the New Critical Idiom series by Routledge, begins its introduction by quoting heavily from M.H. Abrams, whose book The Mirror and the Lamp helped to illuminate Romanticism for the 20th century. In his first chapter, "Enlightenment or Romantic?", Day then sets up the dichotomy between Enlightenment thinking and Romanticism that is often rehearsed by scholars. On the Enlightenment side are figures like William Godwin, who "argued that human beings act in line with reason and that it is impossible for them to be rationally persuaded by an argument without their conduct being regulated accordingly." Romanticism, by contrast, in the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a "celebration of subjectivity."

The second chapter looks at constructions of the term "Romantic" which first appeared in the 17th century. Thomas Shadwell wrote disapprovingly of all things "Romantick" in the preface to his 1668 play The Sullen Lovers. By 1820, debates over Romantic literature raged on the European Continent, but Lord Byron declared he saw no conflict between the "Classical" and the "Romantic" among English writers. Later critics latched on to the term "Romantic" to describe a variety of authors in Britain, but Day warns against dubbing movements in retrospect. "Literature is not" he contends "something which can be regarded as occupying a 'trans-historical' space, but something which must be read as subject to the discourses and ideologies of a particular time and place."

Day's project is best summed up by the title of his third chapter: "Enlightenment AND Romantic." For Day, these two movements are inextricably linked. On the one hand, writers of the Romantic era continued to work towards the progressive social justice championed by Enlightenment figures like Godwin, while at the same time their focus did shift to that of the interior rather than the external world. A key figure here is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose commitment to social change informed his "study of solitary imagination." Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein can even be read as a defense of Day's "and" proposition, since the broodingly interior Frankenstein must ultimately face the consequences of the creature he has unleashed onto the world. As Day puts it, "the writings of those who have formerly been defined as Romantic are not necessarily anti-Enlightenment in any simple sense."

Though that might seem a fitting conclusion, Day includes a final chapter on "Gender and the Sublime" analyzing some of the consequences of Romantic theory first postulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke. Certainly, Burke genders the sublime as masculine and its companion "beautiful" as feminine. Day's point, however, is that this gendering continued to influence Romantic poets. For instance, Wordsworth gendered Nature as feminine, but the female Nature only aided him in apprehending a higher "invisible world." This higher world, Day argues, is associated with the interior mind of the poet, and is thus gendered as masculine. Such arguments break down when the author is a woman, but Day contends that female writers of the period were skeptical of feelings of the sublime and instead focused on nature herself.

David Blayney Brown takes a different approach to Romanticism. While Day focuses on poets and novelists, Brown is interested in painters. He begins his introduction with an examination of Eugène Delacroix's painting The Death of Sardanapalus. He claims the "moral vacuum" at the heart of the piece is "all the more shocking for ignoring the message of the play by the English poet Lord Byron from which he had taken his subject." Notice that Day, discussing literature, ignores drama, while Brown, examining the visual arts, pays close attention to the theatre.

Brown finds a literary parallel for Delacroix's Romanticism in Victor Hugo, whose 1827 preface to his play Cromwell "advocated a rich variety of expression and experience to reflect the complexity of the world and the self, rather than the cold formalism of classical drama, and recognized the value of the ugly or grotesque in engaging the senses, rather than beauty in winning only admiration." For Brown, The Death of Sardanapalus is a "pictorial equivalent" to Hugo's theoretical preface.

Day emphasizes the continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but Brown stresses how revolutionary the new movement was. He claims: "Not since the Renaissance had such a profound change come over the Western consciousness." Instead of incorporating a collective ideal, the Romantic artists "emphasized individual experience, feeling, and expression." This, of course, came from the French Revolution, which Day emphasizes, but also from the rise and fall of Napoleon. As Brown puts it: "Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in individual trauma."

Brown traces the term "Romantic" to Friedrich Schlegel, who in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum in 1798, identified the Romantic with "progressive universal poetry" not based on "inherited and culturally specific forms." Schlegel was writing in the German university town of Jena, which became a hotbed of Romanticism. Though not in Jena, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contributed greatly to the movement as well, and Brown cites Goethe's 1789 play Torquato Tasso as an inspiration for Delacroix's Tasso in the Madhouse, painted fifty years later.

Tasso was a Renaissance poet and playwright, but more modern poets also provided inspiration to Romantic artists. Brown cites Thomas Chatterton, a poet whose suicide in 1770 inspired Henry Wallis (painting in the 1850s) to create the magnificent Death of Chatterton, now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London. The cult of Chatterton was not confined to England, either, as Brown observes that the French writer Alfred de Vigny turned the poet's story into the play Chatterton, which "was a hit in Paris in 1835."

So while Day is interested in Romanticism as a philosophical movement in dialogue with the Enlightenment, Brown sees it as an artistic movement born of political turmoil. Michael Ferber wrestles with both of these concepts in his Romanticism, which bears the subtitle A Very Short Introduction. For him, Romanticism is both an intellectual movement and an artistic movement, and while he sees both sides as distinct, he does not seem to emphasize one over the other. Both of these elements, the philosophical and the aesthetic, are present in the pre-Romantic movement Ferber identifies as Sensibility.

Sensibility is a term that was much more in use in the eighteenth century than "Romantic" or "Romantick." It was associated with such works of "storm and stress" as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and with Gothic writers, including Horace Walpole and Matthew G. Lewis. Ferber also connects it to poets like Mary Robinson, as well as the hugely influential critic and novelist Madame de Staël.

While Ferber successfully traces elements of Sensibility into Romanticism, he definitely seems to be coming at Romanticism from a position of greatly misunderstanding the period's drama. I can overlook his calling Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the poet's "greatest work" as that is a matter of taste. Downright strange, however, is Ferber's comment that Byron's Manfred is "unperformable." Is Ferber really unaware of the many, many successful performances there have been of Manfred? Samuel Phelps was probably the most famous actor to produce the play, but Manfred became so popular that toy theatre versions were made.

For all its faults, though, Ferber's book does give a decent introduction to Romanticism. It attempts to be more balanced than either Day or Brown, gazing into the philosophical and the aesthetic alike. In the end, as Ferber suggests, neither side can be fully understood without the other.

Illuminating Abrams

So yesterday I explained how M.H. Abrams in his book The Mirror and the Lamp traces English Romantic thought back to German theories of vegetable genius. Today, I want to take a look at how these theories influenced the way we think about art in the English-speaking world, particularly how we think about the theatre.

The Romantic critic William Hazlitt manifests the influence of German philosophy in his appropriately titled essay "Is Genius Conscious of Its Powers?" As is evident from the below quote, Hazlitt's answer to that question was an overwhelming "nein":

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.... Correggio, Michael Angelo, Rimbrandt, did what they did without premeditation or effort--their works came from their minds as a natural birth--if you had asked them why they adopted this or that style, they would have answered, because they could not help it.

Poet and playwright Samuel Taylor Coleridge had also read the German theorists. He drew upon them to argue that Shakespeare was great not in spite of his peculiarities, but precisely because of them. Coleridge praised the diversity of Shakespeare's writing, the mixing of comedy and tragedy, the trivial and the sublime. Coleridge appealed not to the ancient laws of Aristotle but "to the great law of nature that opposites tend to attract and temper each other."

Shakespeare was the great hero of the Romantics, but as much as they wanted to worship his genius, they were thwarted in their attempts to understand him as a man. This was not only because of the scanty information available about his biography. (The Romantics knew even less about Shakespeare than we know today, after diligent research in the early twentieth century by the likes of Charles and Hulda Wallace.) The problem was also that the plays of Shakespeare, precisely because of their universality, resist attempts to read them biographically.

Abrams calls this the "Paradox of Shakespeare," the fact that we know him so well and so little at the same time. The plays seem filled with their author, but at the same time he is nowhere to be found in them. That doesn't mean the nineteenth century didn't go looking, and few critics looked harder than Thomas Carlyle. Still, Carlyle had to admit defeat, writing in 1841:

But I will say, of Shakespeare's works generally, that we have no full impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was in him.... Such bursts, however, make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is, in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould.

This image of the tragic Shakespeare, "crushed" in order to fill the theatrical world with his genius, seems to me an idea only the Romantics could have imagined. Other authors received similar treatment by Romantic critics, including Milton and even Homer, but Shakespeare remained the center of their literary universe, as he has remained to this day.

Abrams conjures up a number of Romantic critics to forward his argument. Some of those critics, like Carlyle, are well known today, but others remain obscure. My favorite discovery in reading the book was Joseph Warton, a poet and friend of Samuel Johnson who in the latter half of the eighteenth century wrote fervently about Shakespeare's ability in The Tempest to give "the reins to his boundless imagination" and portray "the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance."

Though Warton's work largely predates the Romantic literary revolution of the 1790s, he is clearly sympathetic to their cause. He wrote all the way back in 1753:

It is the peculiar privilege of poetry... to give Life and motion to immaterial beings; and form, and colour, and action, even to abstract ideas; to embody the Virtues, and Vices, and the Passions.... Prosopopoeia, therefore, or personification, conducted with dignity and propriety, may be justly esteemed one of the greatest efforts of the creative power of a warm and lively imagination.

Abrams links this passage directly to William Wordsworth, who in The Excursion instead of calling upon the hills and streams of the landscape for inspiration, looks instead "to the strong creative power / Of human passion." Here then is the light of the lamp, shining out of the poet, rather than a mirror passively reflecting the world around it.

Light, ever since Sir Isaac Newton broke it up into the colors of the spectrum, had never quite been the same, and Abrams dedicates the last chapter of his book to the dichotomy of science and poetry in Romantic criticism.  Newton's prism seemed more like a prison to many Romantics. After seeing the great Edmund Kean acting Shakespeare, John Keats lamented the fact that "romance lives but in books" and "the rainbow is robbed of its mystery."

Keats later wrote in his long poem Lamia:

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.

But not all Romantics maintained a hostility toward science. Keats' mentor Leigh Hunt once remarked that a man who thinks he is no poet after finding out the scientific cause of a rainbow truly "was none before."

John Stuart Mill, who was raised to be a utilitarian rationalist, but was then converted by the poetry of Wordsworth, eventually declared a truce. Passionately feeling the beauty of a cloud, he said, is no hindrance to understanding that it is actually a vapor of water suspended in air. Mill, though writing of poetry, could just as well have been speaking of the theatre when claimed:

Those who think themselves called upon, in the name of truth, to make war against illusions, do not perceive the distinction between an illusion and a delusion. A delusion is an erroneous opinion--it is believing a thing which is not. An illusion, on the contrary, is an affair solely of feeling, and may exist completely severed from delusion. It consists in extracting from a conception known not to be true, but which is better than truth, the same benefit to the feelings which would be derived from it if it were a reality.

Here we see a moral benefit of art, and in particular of the theatre, which invites the audience to enter fully into the lives of the characters on stage. Through drama, we come to identify with those outside of ourselves and recognize our common lot with all humanity. As Percy Bysshe Shelley put it:

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

So there you have it. Art is not a mere ornamentation, but the greatest possible tool for the betterment of humanity. That's some pretty heady stuff, and in these post-Romantic times, maybe there are more than a few who believe that all the poetry of Alexander Pushkin is not worth a good pair of boots. Shelley, obviously, would disagree, and so would I.

Thus ends my explication of M.H. Abrams' classic book The Mirror and the Lamp. Now go out there and shine!

German Theories of Vegetable Genius

Consciousness can be over-rated. At least that's what the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz believed. According to Leibniz, at any given moment, we each have an infinite number of perceptions within ourselves. That means there are constantly changes within our very souls of which we are unaware, because these changes are "too small and too numerous or too closely combined."

In the eighteenth century, the critic Johann Georg Sulzer picked up on how Leibniz's ideas could be applied to art. In his four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts, Sulzer developed Leibniz's theories of the unconscious, frequently employing the metaphor of a plant to show how art can "bloom" without its creator being fully aware of what he is doing. In one passage, Sulzer writes:

It is a remarkable thing, belonging among other mysteries of psychology, that at times certain thoughts will not develop or let themselves be clearly grasped when we devote our full attention to them, yet long afterwards will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord, when we are not in search of them, so that it seems as though in the interim they had grown unnoticed like a plant, and now suddenly stood before us in their full development and bloom.... Every artist must rely on such happy expressions of his genius, and if he cannot always find what he diligently seeks, must await with patience the ripening of his thoughts. 

Sulzer was not the only one to develop this biological view of art. The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder saw all human endeavors as possessing the qualities of organic growth. Each culture, he believed, grew out of the peculiar conditions of its own time and place. Herder in turn became a great influence on the greatest of all German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

"As I have looked upon nature, so do I now look upon art," Goethe wrote in one of his letters. For Goethe, a perfect work of art was a work of the human spirit, and thus also a work of nature. An artist must not just study an object. He must also penetrate into the depths of his own spirit, creating works in rivalry with nature, "at once natural and above nature," as Goethe put it.

Goethe's own work appeared that way to critics. Friedrich Schlegel wrote of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship that it was a "thoroughly organized and organizing work" and that it formed "itself into one whole." For Schlegel, Goethe's work expressed itself, almost without the need for a creator.

In 1800, a young Friedrich Schelling published his System of Transcendental Idealism, calling for a combining of intelligence and nature, of the conscious and the unconscious, of reflective freedom and blind necessity. This, Schelling said, is what art does, making art "the general organon of philosophy." According to Schelling, all artists must be inspired, receiving their art as a gift of grace. As he put it:

The artist is driven to production involuntarily, and even against an inner resistance.... No matter how purposeful he is, the artist, with respect to that which is genuinely objective in his production, seems to be under the influence of a power that sunders him from all other men and forces him to express or represent things that he himself does not entirely fathom, and whose significance is infinite.

Friedrich Schiller had already explored the idea of the unconscious creation of art in his 1795 essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." After reading Schelling, however, Schiller had a strong reaction. Though an idealist himself, Schiller felt Schelling and his followers were going too far. In 1801 he wrote to Goethe:

I fear that in their ideas, these Idealist-gentlemen take too little notice of experience; in experience, the poet begins entirely with the unconscious... and poetry, it seems to me, consists precisely in being able to express and communicate that unconscious--i.e., to carry it over into an object.... The unconscious united with awareness constitutes the poetic artist.

Schlegel's older brother August agreed with Schiller in this more moderate view, that art is both conscious and unconscious. Still, he continued to use Sulzer's analogy of a plant to describe the process of artistic creation. In his published lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature, the elder Schlegel wrote that organic form:

is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and reaches its determination simultaneously with the fullest development of the seed.... In the fine arts, just as in the province of nature--the supreme artist--all genuine forms are organic....

Genius. Sheer German vegetable genius.

And that explains the German section at the heart of M.H. Abrams' book The Mirror and the Lamp. I'll cover the rest of the book, and try to explain how all this relates to the theatre, in my blog post tomorrow.

By the way, a special thank you to Alex J. Jefferies and the other talented vegetable artists of the Internet for their portraits of famous dead German philosophers. (I'm sure that's precisely what they were going for.)

The Mirror and the Lamp

Back in the 1950s, the critic M.H. Abrams published an important book on Romantic literary theory called The Mirror and the Lamp. The title comes from a major shift Abrams believed happened at the end of the eighteenth century. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, the major metaphor for art had always been a mirror being held up to nature. With Romanticism, however, the metaphor shifted. Art became a lamp, radiating from within the artist into the outside world. Since we made that shift, Abrams argued, art has never been the same.

In his first chapter, Abrams lays out his now famous coordinates for art criticism. All art is related to the universe around it, to its audience, and to its artist. The relationship of art to the universe is explored by mimetic theory. This is the approach of Plato in The Republic and of Aristotle in The Poetics. In his Ars Poetica, however, Horace takes a pragmatic approach, using criticism to show how an artist can more effectively use poetry to move an audience. This is also the approach of Sir Philip Sidney, who in The Apologie for Poetry sees art chiefly as a means to an end. Abrams includes in this second pragmatic category Samuel Jonson, who was troubled by the fact that Shakespeare "seems to write without any moral purpose."

The breakthrough of Romanticism related art back to the artist, creating an expressive theory of criticism. Abrams cites William Wordsworth's 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, which defined poetry as "The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." During the Victorian era, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle continued to develop this theory, raising expressive theory to a form of hero worship of the artistic genius.

There is of course one other way of looking at art, and that is to look at the art itself, disconnected from the world, from the audience, even from its creator. Abrams calls this an objective approach, though he does not imply a moral judgment here. Objective criticism, as practiced by formalist critics including T.S. Eliot, is not necessarily more truthful. It simply is limiting its approach to the work of art and nothing else. It agrees with Archibald MacLeish that "A poem should not mean / But be."

A mimetic approach, of course, does not always mean that the world is portrayed precisely as it is. An eighteenth-century essay sometimes attributed to the playwright Oliver Goldsmith uses the analogy of sculpture to describe how artists pick and choose pieces of the world they wish to represent. According to the essay, a sculptor will take the best parts "from a great number of different subjects" to form "an ideal pattern."

However, there was an even more radical idea lurking in the ancient writings of Plotinus. The Neoplatonist philosopher saw artists as representing not an object in the world, but an abstract ideal form that exists independently of the world. As Plotinus put it:

The arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of the natural world… we must recognize that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking. Thus Pheidias wroght the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight.

This seed planted by Plotinus came to fruition during the Romantic era. Abrams quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who said the goal of the Fine Arts was "to make nature thought, and thought nature." According to Coleridge, beautiful images "though faithfully copied from nature, and accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet." It was instead the poet's job to use images to show, if not the world of ideal forms, the world of emotion within the mind of the poet. Instead of the mind being a tabula rasa of John Locke, simply being written upon by the world, the Romantic mind projected outward, inscribing itself upon the world around it.

The expressive theory of art travelled a long road from the Neoplatonists to Romanticism. Abrams gives special attention to the ancient philosopher Longinus, author of On the Sublime. Longinus held that "there is no tone so lofty as that of genuine passion, in its right place, when it bursts out in a wild gust of mad enthusiasm." He found sublime poetry to be the echo of a great soul. This way of thinking led Romantic theorists to elevate the ancient Hebrew poetry of the Bible to a level akin to that of the ancient Greeks, and to elevate lyric poetry above that of epic poetry, which had previously been seen as the ideal.

Wordsworth and Coleridge took similar but slightly different approaches to this new way of thinking about poetry. Wordsworth advocated "stripping our own hearts naked" and looking to those "who lead the simplest lives." Coleridge did not disagree, but he felt more was necessary to create great poetry than to simply capture the primitive language of rustics. Coleridge's so-called dynamic philosophy emphasized the mind's almost mystic ability to bring about harmony among contraries. According to Coleridge, the poet:

Diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power… reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. 

The next generation of Romantics continued to develop these expressive theories. Percy Bysshe Shelley embraced a sort of Romantic Platonism, writing that poetry "is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." John Keats embraced the enthusiasm of Longinus, writing that "the excellence of every art is its intensity." John Keble gave a famous definition of poetry as "the indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling."

Abrams himself favors a different definition, one coined by a mysterious writer who signed his name "S" in an article called "The Philosophy of Poetry" which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1835. Abrams writes that in all probability this "S" was Alexander Smith, a Scottish scholar who had to retire from teaching early due to poor health. In any case, for "S" prose is the language of intelligence, while poetry is the language of emotion. Thus prose communicates our knowledge about objects while poetry expresses how these objects affect us. As the Blackwood's article puts it, poetry "is essentially the expression of emotion; but the expression of emotion takes place by measured language (it may be verse, or it may not)--harmonious tones--and figurative phraseology."

According to "S" a line like "My son Absalom" is not poetry, but the Bible is poetic when King David laments "oh! Absalom, my son, my son." Though the interjection of "oh" and the repetition of "my son" don't actually add any meaning to the phrase, they take the passage beyond a mere statement of fact to become an expression of a deep emotion. But how do poets, dramatic or otherwise, create works that express such emotions?

This brings Abrams to the shift from mechanical to organic theories of creation. Up through the eighteenth century, most theorists saw the process of creation as one of construction. A playwright, for instance, built a play in the same way a shipwright builds a ship. It was up to the writer to assemble together all of the elements of a play according to a preordained plan. In so doing, an artist had to build a play, or poem, or statue, according to certain fixed rules, just as a shipwright must construct a vehicle that will be inherently bound by the laws of physics. As the Scottish poet James Beattie put it in 1776:

It would be no less absurd, for a poet to violate the essential rules of his art, and justify himself by an appeal from the tribunal of Aristotle, than for a mechanic to construct an engine on principles inconsistent with the laws of motion, and excuse himself by disclaiming the authority of Sir Isaac Newton.

Coleridge replaces this mechanical model with a new one, that of an organism that grows naturally, assembling together a variety of elements without needing to be conscious of how it does so. In a letter to Wordsworth, Coleridge equated the philosophy of mechanism to that of death. Art, rather, was a living thing, much like a plant that grows from a seed, assimilating earth, air, light, and water into something new. Artists, though they might follow a natural pattern, need not be any more conscious of rules than an oak tree is aware of how it grows from an acorn.

This unconscious quality of genius became an important part of Romantic theory. Prior to Romanticism, critics recognized natural genius, but rarely praised it. In a typical passage in The Spectator, Joseph Addison compared natural genius to a wild landscape with no order or regularity. Artful genius, on the other hand, was "the same rich soil under the same happy climate, that has been laid out in walks and parterres, and cut into shape and beauty by the skill of the gardener." Similarly, Alexander Pope saw Shakespeare as an instrument of nature, while Homer was a genius who had tended a mighty tree until it had produced the finest of fruit.

This prejudice in favor of artful genius, as opposed to natural genius, was not confined to literary critics. One of the greatest champions of artful genius was the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. While he did not advocate a strict following of arbitrary rules, Reynolds praised artists who could discover the tendencies of the natural world and recreate them in painting. Reynolds held that:

It cannot be by chance, that excellencies are produced with any constancy or any certainty, for this is not the nature of chance.... [T]he rules by which... such as are called men of Genius, work, are either such as they discover by their own peculiar observations, or... [are] not easily to admit being expressed in words.

Yet not much later, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and others were praising the natural, unconscious growth of poetry from the pure, virgin mind of the poet, not from some system of scientific discovery. Where did they get this idea? Did they come up with it from the undefiled wells of their souls? No. They stole it. From the Germans.

Which brings us to the most thought-provoking (and ridiculous) subject heading in Abrams' entire book: "German Theories of Vegetable Genius." 

A subject heading like that deserves its own blog post. Come back tomorrow to see what Abrams meant by that doozie.