ABSTRACT
Modern poetry has made a break with the past, and in consequence many have turned upon the past with either contempt or disdain. Often the attack has centred upon some interpretation of the terms 'romantic' and 'romanticism', which have been used with a hostile and disparaging effect. F. L. Lucas went as far as to name a volume of criticism, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal. Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, a remarkable study of erotic sensibility in romantic literature, left the impression that he had been traversing a territory fantastic, perverse, and obscene. For the attack has led some defenders of romanticism to speak out with equal severity. Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism was published in 1919, a year of too many preoccupations for its immediate or adequate reception in England. Babbitt had his own conceptions of tradition, and of a cultural and moral order.
