18 - Romanticism and poetic autonomy

Summary

The symbiotic growth of critical and literary self-consciousness is so striking a feature of the Romantic period that many participants at the time and many subsequent commentators have thought it the historical key to understanding Romanticism. This mutual development is of course in line with the gradual democratization of print culture from the restricted court circulation of poetry up to the seventeenth century down to the global internet of our own day. But in Romanticism the critical interaction between writer and reader presided over the democratic function communication is now often assumed to possess necessarily. From around 1798, in Britain and mainland Europe, a new critical establishment leaps into being. Its characteristic idioms extend from the elliptical and highly theorized aphorisms of the early German Romantic journals to the anti-systematic ad hominem / feminam broadsides of British critics writing for politically partisan Reviews. Corresponding to this increased journalistic attention paid to literary pretensions is the professional self-consciousness of writers, especially poets, the characteristic reflexivity of whose writing to some extent pre-empts the critics, making the question of literary reception part of its subject matter. ‘The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity’, trumpets Coleridge’s 1817 Biographia Literaria, the age’s outstanding attempt to bridge both German and British traditions by advocating a literature philosophically encoding a conservative purpose and a philosophy radically open to literary extension. But, as Shelley insisted a few years later, part of what poets thus activated was evidently a critical afterlife outlasting their own intentions for their work and bound to no single critical institution.