Charm in Literature from Classical to Modernism by Richard Beckman

Author:Richard Beckman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030253455
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Harold Bloom’s book on the anxiety of influence argues that anxiety could take the form of turning against the chosen predecessor. In any case, it was Wordsworth who lived for years and years, while those that followed him, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, did in fact die young. The relationship between the English Romantics was a mixture of admiration, friendship, ambivalence, disagreement, and sometimes distaste.

Byron and Shelley were fast friends. Wordsworth and Coleridge were companion poets, but not for life. Keats had regarded Wordsworth as supreme, in a class with Shakespeare and Milton, but was subsequently put off by what he called Wordsworth’s making his poetry out of “the egotistical sublime.” (He wished himself to be, like Shakespeare, a “chameleon poet,” with no fixed ego-identity.)

These were the senses in which charm was taken by the major English Romantics: for Blake what mattered was “mental charm”; for Wordsworth charm was to be found in the excited speech of ordinary men, and distinctly not in poetic diction; Coleridge did not always disparage charm; he defined charm explicitly when he wrote (in Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV) of “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape.” Imagination, defamiliarization , and even hallucination brought charm into the world; Shelley seems to have found epistemology charming, as in the opening and the closing lines of Mont Blanc: “The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind” and “what were thou [Mont Blanc] and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?” The human mind’s imaginings: the Romantics were alike in exploring the place of Kantian subjectivity in experience.

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