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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
Susan Wolfson. Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. 344. $19.95 paper.
In the early decades of our century, a sure indicator of literary sophistication was the contemptuous dismissal of "romantic" poetry as lyrical, mythic, sensuous, and anti-form. Indeed, even romanticism's revisionist defenders of mid-century, like Wellek, fought on this ground, arguing the virtues of symbolism and a new kind of "organic" form. Formalist critics remained ambivalent about romantic poetry, approving of organic form only as it appeared in tightly controlled lyrics, like some Wordsworth sonnets or in plays of irony and paradox, like Keats's Odes. Within romantic studies itself, formalism had a bad odor. For historically-minded critics, especially, an aesthetic focus evoked the modernist hauteur that had dismissed most romantic lyrics as emotional transgressions of precise poetic form. An historicism that seeks the origin of lyric language in the contexts of power relationships, of historical fault line, in the inherent contradictions of self-articulation within social determinations must see a pure aesthetic analysis as a naive mystification. And because formalists could offer a Coleridgean "organic form" as romanticism's only admirable claim to the naturalism and autonomy of poetic language, some historicists, having adopted this history, could condemn exclusive attention to poetics as a romantic ideology of false resolutions to the social contradictions that generate literary form.
In an important new work, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism, Susan Wolfson attempts to navigate these treacherous shoals and return formal study to the center of a sophisticated and historically sensitive analysis of romantic poems. In this book and in recent articles (such as her contribution to the special issue of Studies in Romanticism she guest edited on Ideology and Romantic Aesthetics [Spring 1998]) Wolfson is calling, in effect, for a New Formalism. Central to her project is her shrewd attempt to show that real engagement with social and historical conflict may in fact be found closer to the surface than historicists suspect, in the tropes and forms of simile and couplet, of assonance, and meter, and rhyme. Implicit in this argument is the notion that particular aesthetic...
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