ABSTRACT
It is almost sixty years since A.O.J.Lovejoy published his influential essay ‘On the discrimination of Romanticisms’.1 Scholars have debated the claims of that essay, some of them wishing to qualify its pluralist outlook in the interest of preserving some workable sense of ‘the Romantic’ as a broad generic concept, if not as a unitary phenomenon. But on the whole-as usual with scholarly endeavour-the trend has been to multiply distinctions and cast doubt on tidy, panoptic generalizations. Literary critics and theorists have moved in what seems an opposite direction. Perhaps the most notable feature of current (poststructuralist) critical writing is the way it has restored the Romantics to an intellectual dignity and central importance denied them by T.S.Eliot and his academic followers. Critics like Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man have rejected not only the privileged ‘tradition’ of Eliot’s creating, but the entire epistemology of language, truth and logic which underlay that tradition.2 What Eliot famously disliked about the Romantics was their overreaching of the poet’s proper interests, their straining beyond the bounds of disciplined thought toward a realm of transcendent knowledge which could only-for Eliot-amount to a drastic, even blasphemous confusion of ends.3 For the current deconstructors it is precisely this sense of intellectual strain-of language and logic pressed up against their limits-which identifies and paradoxically validates the ‘rhetoric of Romanticism’.
