Sarah M. Zimmerman. Romanticism, Lyricism, and History.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xxii+233. $20.50 cloth/ $19.95 paper.

How long ago it all now seems. It was the late 1980s, even the historicists still talked in terms of the Big Six of British romantic poetry, and there were rumors that a graduate student at Princeton named Sarah Zimmerman was working on "noncanonical writers." Now the John Clare Society has two sessions a year at MLA, presumably the average student specializing in romanticism in a major graduate program knows Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head" and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" and, rightly, respects them as central poems of the period. Zimmerman's project, no doubt conceived when noncanonicity was noncanonical, emerges at a time when noncanonicity is if anything taken for granted. But has what Zimmerman terms "the broadening of the field's traditional chronological and generic boundaries" (148) actually affected the ingrained paradigms of romantic literary study? In Romanticism, Lyricism, and History, Zimmerman, now Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, attempts just this task--the resetting of norms of romantic lyricism in the light of a knowledgeable assessment of the work of Clare, Smith, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

First, though, Zimmerman has to set out the principles of the romantic lyric itself, which is the focus of the opening chapter. The romantic lyric has been traditionally seen, by formalists and historicists alike, as evading historical responsibility and reference. With refreshing frankness, Zimmerman gets to the heart of the matter. "Even as new historicism has critiqued the ideological implications of a rhetoric of interiority and transcendence ... the terms of that critique have ironically reinforced an equation of that poetic mode with these extraformal qualities" (3). The culprit here is a rhetoric of romantic lyricism as lapsing away from an imputed original point of political rebellion in the wake of the French Revolution. Zimmerman chronicles the evocation of this rhetoric in commentators as different, politically and otherwise, as M. H. Abrams and E. P. Thompson. Abrams, in particular, is cited as overtly alluding to W. H. Auden's disillusionment with the false promise of Communism in situating his own account of Wordsworth's apolitical later career. The problem here is not so much that Wordsworth's "political...

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