sum041 -- SUMS

Summary

Abrams, M.H. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism.New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

821.09 Ab83e

Summary by Leigh Anna Mendenhall

This book combines essays on English peotry of the Romantic Age. Although many of the essays focus on specific writers and may therefore be too narrow for our papers on Romanticism, there are three essays that deal with Romantic poetry in a more general manner. All of these essays are critical except for the first, and they all give distinguished, and many times conflicting, points of view. The three general essays all deal with topics that run through most of the Romantic peotry, while the essays about individuals usually deals with the ideas of the poets and an assessment of their poems.

In the first essay, "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms," the author illustrates the nature of certain procedures used in the study of Romanticism. He looks at each procedure and then analyses the results of these procedures and its importance. The author addresses the question of what effects the movement had, both moral and aesthetic; however, he also states that first the task of analysis and comparison must be made. The way that each "historically significant and philosophically instructive" idea appears depends on how it is approached.

The other two general essays describe Romantic nature imagery and metaphors that run through Romantic poetry, respectively. The other essays discuss such authors as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.

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Jesse D. Hurlbut--

Last Updated November 10, 1993