ABSTRACT
In chapter 3 we drew a distinction between allegory and the symbol, noting that the Romantics invested most in the powers of symbolism, while in chapter 5 we saw Benjamin’s opposition to this view. As part of a critique of eighteenth-century empirical philosophy, which Coleridge, amongst others, found mechanical and dead, Romanticism emphasized the value of human presence and of transcendental values, downgrading allegory for its mechanical qualities. Romanticism in its turn has been the subject of the critique of deconstruction, which argues that the stress on ‘presence’ serves another ideology: that of humanism, and the belief in certain central, and, incidentally, Eurocentric, ‘human’ values. A key move in deconstructive criticism has been to show that the text, whatever it may seem to assert, is premised on absence, on a lack within the speaking subject, who therefore cannot claim to have the ‘presence’ that much Romantic poetry asserts, as when, for instance, Wordsworth calls poetry ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.
