ABSTRACT
This is a study of four Jewish scholar/critics of nineteenth-century literature, particularly Romantic poetry, whose influence upon the field of Romanticism since the mid-twentieth century has been foundational. Lionel Trilling, M.H. Abrams. Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman (all faculty in elite American universities— Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and Yale, respectively) influenced our thinking about Romantic poetry in a central way during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In particular, the last three (and Trilling to a lesser extent) consolidated a way of describing a paradigmatic Romantic poem, what Abrams named the "Greater Romantic Lyric," and more generally promoted a cluster of features around which the success and interest of a Romantic poem could be measured. Like most paradigms of Western lyric, theirs calls attention to the mind of the speaker, but in the case of the Jewish Romanticists that mind finds itself in what can be called "the drama of the lyric subject." a kind of journey from some internal division to its possible healing. Whereas scholars have noted and discussed this "patriarchal" generation of Jewish Romantic critics, they have not, to my knowledge, focused on their relationship to this poetic form. After reviewing the form and characteristics of the "Greater Romantic Lyric," I am asking the question: can one describe this subgenre of poetry in relation to the Jewish origins and lives of these critics? What might have drawn them to formulate this particular lyric paradigm? Following this discussion I will conclude with a consideration of a separate, but I believe related, phenomenon— an absoiption among three of the critics (Trilling, Bloom, and Hartman) in critical prose style, which implies to me a relationship between the value they place on their particular way of characterizing Romantic lyric and the "interestedness" of their own inquiries.
