Masters of Repetition: Poetry, Culture, and Work in Thomson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emerson.(Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-00

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University

Lisa M. Steinman. Masters of Repetition: Poetry, Culture, and Work in Thomson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emerson. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. Pp. viii+248. $49.95.

If, as critics as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom acknowledge, all literary criticism is merely disguised autobiography, then there is another book not far beneath the surface of Lisa Steinman's timely and compelling Masters of Repetition. The problems of vocational--specifically poetic--self-justification with which she deals are especially relevant to today's academy and literary marketplace, where reading, leisure, contemplation, "aesthetics" and the private life in general increasingly take a back seat to public entertainment, mass culture, and pop studies. But Steinman, herself a poet as well as the author of a previous critical work, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets, makes it clear (as did Bloom but from a different vantage point) that we still inhabit a romantic age, that Wordsworth's and Shelley's problems in regard to self-conception, to the relationships of poet to reader and of private citizen to public life, are our problems as well. She ends her introduction with an admission that "these are the writers by whom my own ear has in part been trained, and my interest in how the public role of poetry has been described in the past is tacitly a contemporary interest, my own act of looking back, from the context of the late twentieth century" (8). One might look forward to a more direct, personal evaluation of these issues in a subsequent book.

Two centuries after the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, what has happened to the place of poets in our culture, the connections between public and private modes of discourse, and between poetry and power? Not much. Even earlier (although Steinman doesn't have much to say about this in her several references to "Lycidas") Milton wrote his elegy in part as a proleptic statement of his own fears...

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