Abstract
These are some of the big claims with which Jerome McGann famously inaugurated the new historicist transformation of Romantic Studies. From the start, Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey’ was one of new histor-icism’s exemplary texts. For McGann himself, Tintern Abbey’ perfectly demonstrates the kind of ‘poetic conceptualization’ that for him characterises Romantic literature, ‘whereby the actual human issues with which the poetry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized locations’.1
The idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture is the grand illusion of every Romantic poet.
The grand illusion of Romantic ideology is that one may escape [the] world through imagination and poetry.
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Notes
Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 91
Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 37–8.
Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 32
Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 179
Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 76.
Sarah Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism and History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 100.
Susan Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 61.
David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: the Poetry of Displacement (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), p. 110
Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 169.
Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 113.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Collins’, in Thomas Woodman (ed.), Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 70–92(p. 86).
See Dustin Griffin, ‘Akenside’s Political Muse’, in Robin Dix (ed.), Mark Aken-side: A Reassessment (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 19–51
Paul Whiteley, ‘Gray, Akenside and the Ode’, in W. B. Hutchings and William Ruddick (eds), Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), pp. 171–88
Brennen O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: a Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, Ohio and London: Kent State University Press, 1995), p. 155
John Heath Stubbs, The Ode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 61
John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 160
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© 2007 Alan Rawes
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Rawes, A. (2007). Romantic Form and New Historicism: Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’. In: Rawes, A. (eds) Romanticism and Form. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206144_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206144_6
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