ABSTRACT

The pastoral green of Adrienne Rich's poem is one of echoes, as Carlos Baker would have recognized with William Blake. Carlos Baker's ground-breaking study of The Echoing Green: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Phenomena of Transference Poetry take its main title from Blake's poem of the same name. Rich's response to Romanticism is a doubly complex one as with the felling of the elm. She keeps both the faith with and breaks with those bygone Romantic traditions, motifs, and sensibilities. For the Irish poet and dramatist, W. B. Yeats, Romanticism was no less a site of imaginative, personal, and communal creative engagement. Focusing on representative poems from across the range of Yeats's successful and richly diverse career as a poet, Callaghan conceives of Yeats's poetics as both responding to Romanticism as a momentous epoch and recognizing this cultural phenomenon as comprised of those complex, discrete, practices and beliefs of highly individualized poets.