ABSTRACT
When, in his essay ‘English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age’, M.H. Abrams proposed that the Romantic poets ‘were all centrally political and social poets’ (quoted p. 94), he invoked as an authority the writings of William Hazlitt. Abrams referred to the 1818 lecture ‘On the Living Poets’, where Hazlitt observed that ‘the Lake school of poetry . . . had its origin in the French revolution, or rather in those . . . opinions which produced that revolution’ (quoted p. 86). As I indicated in the previous chapter, Abrams argues that the revolutionary nature of Wordsworth’s poetry is to be understood less in directly political and more in spiritual and aesthetic terms. In form and subject Wordsworth subverted ‘a view of poetry inherited from the Renaissance’, a view which had ‘assumed and incorporated a hierarchical structure of social classes’ (quoted p. 100). It was in
challenging this view of poetry, in challenging a class-based hierarchy of genres, styles and fit subjects, that Wordsworth managed to be a political and social poet. Actual politics were displaced into the realm of the spirit, which for Abrams remains in some sense politicized and socialized: ‘Having given up the hope of revolutionizing the social and political structure, Wordsworth . . . discovered that his new calling . . . is to effect through his poetry an egalitarian revolution of the spirit’ (quoted p. 100). To support this view of Wordworth’s poetry Abrams quotes from Hazlitt’s 1825 book The Spirit of the Age:
[Wordworth’s poetry] partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His Muse . . . is a levelling one. It proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard. . . .
