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The community of the poem

It may not be customary to frame discussions of educational history in terms of ideology. Yet it is commonly assumed that periods and movements of ideas do provide appropriate terms of reference for the study of changing educational practices. This article will argue that during the first quarter of the 19th century British Romanticism became strongly engaged with ideologies of education, especially literary education, and that this engagement manifested itself in institutional procedures by which even now the disciplinary norms of english in schools and universities continued to be shaped. The A. wants to shed light on current debates about literary education by showing that, while the academic discipline of english has taken different forms in different places over the last century and a half, its curriculum and pedagogy have predominantly been shaped by the pressure of romantic writings ideas, particularly those of Wordsworth

Romantic Ideologies, Educational Practices, and Institutional Formations of English

The impact of Shakespeare on Romantic literary criticism may be measured in at least three ways. First, his place in the canon: starting in the later eighteenth century, a transformation in taste, led and articulated by critical writings, radically changed the value of Shakespeare. In the world of culture and learning, Shakespeare ceased to be primarily a source of pleasure and of interest almost exclusively in England; he became by the 1830s a universal genius known and admired, throughout the West, for his deep insight into the human condition. His newly exemplary pedagogical value made Shakespeare the basis for England's educational mission in India. Shakespeare's cultural destiny was thus linked to Britain's rise to world power in the decades from the Seven Years' War through the Napoleonic struggles; Britain's wars against France counterpointed and reinforced the challenge Shakespeare offered to the literary values of the French neoclassicism that dominated European thought for more than a century. Second, the place of Romantic critics in the canon of Shakespeare studies: German works by August Wilhelm Schlegel and English works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt are landmarks that still serve as points of departure for fresh thinking nearly two centuries later. Third, Shakespeare was a crucial starting point for important Romantic writers as they made innovative contributions in poetry and fiction, as well as in literary criticism and theory: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, John Keats, Herman Melville.

The impact of Shakespeare

If the Russian Formalists were right in claiming that alterations in the hierarchy of genres are the deepest indicators of literary change, one important measure of the “revolution in literature” that we call Romanticism is the changed status of didactic poetry. A genre that, in Addison’s eyes, had produced “the most complete, elaborate and finished Piece of all Antiquity”—Virgil’s Georgics2—and that Thomas Tickell could rank “second to Epic alone” in the hierarchy of poetic forms,3 became for the Romantics a byword for mediocrity, a violation of the true nature of poetry, or a simple contradiction in terms. The reorientation of literary values signaled by Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756), which damned Pope with the faint praise of having excelled in poetry “of the didactic, moral, and satyric kind; and, consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry”4 was strengthened and extended half a century later by the Romantics, who favored genres—especially lyric forms— marginalized by the “French School” of Dryden and Pope, and who developed a poetics based on expressly antididactic premises. William Lisle Bowles’ presumed victory over Byron and others in the long-running “Pope controversy” was critical confirmation of the new literary order, whose antididactic stance is exemplified by many of the period’s most famous pronouncements on the subject of poetry. Blake’s “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” and “cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration,”5 Keats’ “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us” and his insistence that “an artist” must serve the “Mammon” of “Poetry, and dramatic effect” rather the “God” of “purpose,”6 Shelley’s “didactic poetry is my abhorrence”7 and De Quincey’s contradistinction of the “literature of knowledge” from the “literature of power” (see note 19

John E. Jordan

Papers

De Quincey as critic

The English romantic poets & essayists : a review of research and criticism

Some British Romantics: A Collection of Essays

De Quincey to Wordsworth : a biography of a relationship : with the letters of Thomas de Quincey to the Wordsworth family