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Creating Nature
It is well understood that nature is inextricably interwoven throughout the genre of poetry known as Romantic, and that the roles nature plays within that genre are myriad: its powerful imagery can reflect or alter the emotion of the poet; it can serve as the agent of great introspection on behalf of the poet, and finally it can have great restorative effects upon the alienated poet. Yet according to M.H. Abrams, in his essay “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” the poet’s relationship with and usage of nature as he reports it occasions a much more profound melancholic meditation that ultimately results in a synthesis wherein the poet resolves or reinterprets his alienation. Abrams charts the origins of this formula in what he terms “the greater Romantic lyric” and places emphasis on the poet’s description of landscape, for it is this description that allows the poet’s imagination to project himself and his emotions onto the landscape and to craft a type of “response” from the landscape, in which values for humanity are implicit in nature.
Abrams at first defines and expounds on what he calls “the greater Romantic lyric” as differing from other lyric poetry in that “the visual report is invariably the occasion for a meditation which turns out to constitute the raison d’etre of the poem” (202). He situates the form as the first unique lyric invention of the genre, a style which he credits Coleridge as establishing but one in which Wordsworth was also quite successful with “Tintern Abbey” (203-04). An alternate appellation for this poem is “the descriptive-meditative poem,” but Abrams rejects this term in favor of the “greater Romantic lyric.” I think it is important to point out the former term as it informs us exactly what the form consists of. Abrams describes the formula for this poem as such:
They present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. (201)
This approach is evident in many of Coleridge’s poems, notably in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” in which Coleridge imaginatively and particularly describes and inscribes the setting (despite his own physical absence from it) and addresses both the landscape and his friend Charles Lamb, who is in the imaginative setting the poet has created. The same approach is also manifested in “Frost at Midnight ,” as Coleridge’s meditation is addressed to the sleeping infant by his side. Abrams goes on to describe the formula:
The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation and feeling which remains closely interwoven with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation. (201)
Thus does the landscape serve as both the catalyst for introspection and the stage upon which the poet projects and acts out his inner feelings of conflict and dejection. We can chart this progression easily in Coleridge’s “Lime-Tree Bower,” when the poet, placing himself in the very place where he imagines his friends to be (thus demonstrating the power of the imaginative to transcend physical boundaries and bondage), is able to break from his melancholy and appreciate the real, physical landscape of the bower in which he sits (ln 43-47). This is the synthesis of the poem, where both internal and external reconciliation are able to take place. This is the return to the beginning, back to the lime-tree bower, and Coleridge ascribes the resolution not just to his self, but intends that it should be understood as something greater as it takes on a more macrocosmic perspective in the last line of the poem: “No sound is dissonant which tells of Life” (ln 76). This capital L “Life” is clearly meant to denote greater humanity as a whole, thus taking the poem from the realm of the individual and ascribing it to the whole in a “deliberate endeavor to transform a segment of experience broken out of time into a sufficient aesthetic whole” (Abrams 205). Abrams invokes the image of the ouroboros, the tail eating snake, as a metaphor for this literary trope, one which posits the greater Romantic lyric within its literary-historical context and also serves as an appropriate symbol for Coleridge’s “descriptive-meditative-descriptive” poem (206).
Though the humanist meditation may be the heart of the poem, Abrams stresses that the landscape description is equally important, as it is the catalyst of the remembrance or the meditation. Abrams notes that the greater Romantic lyric is near always set in a particular surrounding, often mentioned in the title or in a subscript to the title preceding the poem itself. This derives much from the “loco-descriptive” poem, a form which “combined a description of that scene with the thoughts that the scene suggested” (208). By describing a physically real setting and not one whose origins are purely imaginative, a distinct boundary is created between descriptive external and the meditative internal. It is also a way for the poet to loco-descriptively make his thoughts and perceptions a part of the scene. Abrams, like many of his contemporaries, traces the loco-descriptive poem back to John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill,” in which Denham observes the Thames and describes it in such a way as to give it a political and social significance, and pairs natural objects to ideas of morality. It was this latter procedure, Abrams argues, that is key, because “for many of Denham’s successors it displaced history and politics to become the sole meditative component in local poems, and it later evolved into the extended meditation of the Romantic lyric” (209). However, unlike loco-descriptive poems such as Wordsworth’s “An Evening Walk,” wherein the break from picturesque description is precipitated by a new, jarring arrival into the landscape (whereby the meditation still find its locus in the description), the greater Romantic lyric’s description is broken by a lament or meditation that takes place outside of the frame of the landscape, as in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” or “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” While these are similar to Denham’s conceit, Abrams notes the main difference in the intensely personal aspect of the meditation: “the topographical form, however, has been adapted…so that the focus of interest is no longer in the analogical inventory of scenic detail, but in the mental and emotional experience of a specific lyric speaker” (211).
Abrams cites as Coleridge’s main influence in establishing the greater Romantic lyric as a unique form William Lisle Bowles’s Sonnets of 1789. Bowles’s sonnets are the first Coleridge encountered in which the poet’s emotions were “suggested by the scenes before them; and wherever such scenes appeared to harmonise with his disposition at the moment, the sentiments were involuntarily prompted” (Bowles, qtd. in Abrams, 213). It was this integration of the perceiver himself into the landscape, this enmeshment of his emotions and the scene before him that directly influenced Coleridge’s poetry. Coleridge remarked that Bowles’s sonnets were marked by a sentiment of loneliness, and such an attitude (later to be classified as “dejection”) characterizes the opening and meditation of “Lime-Tree Bower” and “Dejection: An Ode.”
A certain universality and interconnectedness also underlies the greater Romantic lyric, a connectedness that allows for the landscape to have such a profound effect on the speaker and to legitimate his own moral or introspective meditation. This idea would first have to reject the dominant philosophical approach prior to Coleridge, the approach espoused by both Descartes and Locke that would make the Romantic attempt to connect impossible. Abrams categorizes these approaches that Coleridge found so unsuitable as, firstly, “dualism, the absolute separation between mind and the material universe” and secondly, “the method of reasoning underlying this dualism, that pervasive elementarism which takes as its starting point the irreducible element or part and conceives all wholes to be a combination of discrete parts, whether material atoms or mental ‘ideas’” (217). This denial of animating spirit creates a division in the world, and alienates man so that in Coleridge’s own words a “philosophy of Death” is created, “and only of a dead nature can it hold good” (Coleridge, qtd. in Abrams 218). The meditation in the greater Romantic lyric is often a meditation on this alienation from the world, and as in “Lime-Tree Bower,” it is also both a physical and spiritual estrangement from nature. The poet, both in physical and mental isolation at the start of the poem, is through the human process of intellection and imagination able to re-forge and re-establish a connection to nature. The return to the descriptive at the end of the poem, or what Abrams might call the synthesis, is the poet re-integrating with the material world. Whereas the first description was the poet’s perception, this second, later description is now the poet’s perception infused with the imaginative act through which he forged a connection. As Abrams articulates it: “the ‘synthetic and magical power’ of the secondary imagination repeats the primal act of knowing by dissolving the elements of perception ‘in order to recreate’ them, and ‘reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’…'the idea, with the image’” (219-20). It is the projection of the poet’s inward self onto the landscape which has allowed him to overcome his “lonely feeling” and make sense of a discordant world.
The greater Romantic lyric then, according to Abrams, is the act of communion in which the poet initially removes his meditation from nature only to become absorbed by nature at the close (or Abrams’s synthesis) of the poem. While in most Romantic poetry nature and man are a often a reflection of the other, in the greater Romantic lyric, it is the imagination that breaks through this mirror and allows nature and the human emotion to converge. Abrams argues to this effect:
The best Romantic meditations on a landscape, following Coleridge’s examples, all manifest a transaction between subject and object in which the thought incorporates and makes explicit what was already implicit in the outer scene….When the Romantic poet confronted a landscape, the distinction between self and not-self tended to dissolve. (223)
Thus are the poet and his perception amalgamated, and the self takes on a universality, a firm connection to nature that is unbreakable within the faculty of imagination, and by which the alienation is overcome.
Finally, Abrams looks at the quality of the Romantic meditation as dejection. Dejection is defined as
…not the pleasing melancholy of the eighteenth-century poet of sensibility, nor Bowles’s muted self-pity, but a profound sadness, sometimes bordering on the anguish of terror or despair, at the sense of loss, dereliction, isolation, or inner death, which is presented as inherent in the conditions of the speaker’s existence. (225)
Dejection, as an apathetic state wherein the imagination is paralyzed, is a particularly distressing state for a Romantic poet, who is only able to escape alienation through the imaginative act. Abrams compares the dejection of the Romantic poets to the spiritual crises of the earlier religious poets, as in both the individual has lost the “celestial light” or “glory,” and in this way the Romantic lyric, though overtly secular, takes on a theological dimension (227). Yet Abrams also notes that there is a specificity inherent to the Romantic lyric that is absent from the earlier poetry, which dealt mainly with materials of a general symbolic nature. The Romantic lyric, meanwhile, is almost always concerned with a specific place or object, and the meanings derived are of a private, more personal nature rather than a more public, universal one.
M.H. Abrams concludes by once more returning to “Cooper’s Hill” as the first descriptive poem to blend meditation and remembrance with perception. This well suited the Romantic sensibility, which sought to unify nature and the human condition through what Coleridge refers to in “Dejection: An Ode” as his “shaping spirit of imagination” (ln 86).
Jessica H. Gray
University of Rhode Island
October 25, 2005
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Required Texts
John Milton. Paradise Lost (Norton)
Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge)
William Godwin. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Penguin)
Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)
William Wordsworth. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)
H. J. Jackson, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)
Donald H. Reiman, ed. Shelley's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton)
Jerome McGann, ed. Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford)
Edward Hirsch, ed. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Random House)
Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)
Course Packet (Rhode Island Book Company)
NOTE: With the exceptions of Caleb Williams and the Course Packet, all materials are available through Reserve at the URI library.
Course Requirements
Class Participation (15%)
Seminar Paper (70%)
Class Opening (15%)
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