00001.tif

PDF

Download

Open document

Transcript (if available)

Content THE ROMANTIC LEGACY:
GENIUS AND AUTHORIAL POWER
IN MODERN COMPOSITION THEORY
by
Jean Flanigan Johnson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1992
Copyright 1992 Jean Flanigan Johnson
UMI Number: DP23170
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Dissertation Publishing
UMI DP23170
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-4015
This dissertation, written by
If- 'dei.ASo/y
under the direction of h Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
EL
' 9 2.
J Cl
3
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
D a te f .
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One
Genius Theory in the Eighteenth Century
Chapter Two
The Mythic Genius of Lyrical Ballads
Chapter Three
The Critics' Rebuttal
Chapter Four
The Don Juan Crisis
Chapter Five
The Romantic Legacy in Composition Theory
Afterword
To Teachers
Works Cited
Appendix
i i i
ABBREVIATIONS
BL Bioqraphia Literaria
BU Bvron's Letters and Journals
ER Edinburgh Review
LB Lyrical Ballads
LSTC Collected Letters of Samuel Tavlor Coleridge
LWDW Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth
QE
Quarterly Review
1
INTRODUCTION
Since the latest surge of interest in composition
studies began twenty-five years ago, American
compositionists have been steadily battling over theory
and pedagogy. The dominant twentieth-century paradigm
for writing education, the so-called "current-
traditional" model, exerts a continuing influence in
writing classes but has come under increasing attack,
both for its practical limitations in dealing with the
nontraditional students that have poured into college
writing classrooms and for the theoretical limitations
of its heavy emphasis on style and correctness at the
expense of invention.
Two groups of composition theorists have sought to
replace the current-traditional paradigm with one that
is theoretically richer as well as more effective. A
diverse group of "new rhetoricians,1 1 including Richard
Larson, W. Ross Winterowd, and Edward P. J. Corbett,
have worked to reconnect composition to its
intellectual roots in classical rhetoric, as well as to
draw on related disciplines that study language
interactions, such as linguistics, philosophy, and
communication. These theorists take a transactional
view of writing and emphasize the arts of rhetorical
invention and persuasion. In contrast, a loosely
related group of neo-Romantic compositionists has
described invention as a personal quest for meaning.
These theorists, including Ken Macrorie, William Coles
Ann Berthoff, and Peter Elbow, focus on the expressive
function of writing, downplaying the need to address
texts to an audience.1
One fundamental difference between these two
approaches is their disagreement over the power
relations of writer and reader. Rhetorical theorists
typically describe composition as a transaction in
which writers and their potential readers mutually
influence one another. Neo-Romantics, on the other
hand, locate power squarely in the hands of the writer
describing successful composing as an act in which the
author draws on inner linguistic and intellectual
resources instead of addressing the needs of an
audience. They argue,that if a text somehow emanates
from deep inside an author, it will resonate with such
power that readers will follow her wherever she leads,
despite her apparent reluctance to aim the text at
them.
This faith in indirect authorial power is nothing
new. Indeed, these expressive writing theories
incorporate assumptions about literary relationships
3
that were widely held in the nineteenth century. As
Winterowd has pointed out, before these assumptions
reached modern composition theory, they were filtered
through the writings of I. A. Richards, Ernst Cassirer,
Suzanne Langer, and others ("Purification"). But these
assumptions have also come to us by a more direct
route, for they are preserved in the canonical texts of
the English Romantics. Neo-Romantic composition
theorists, like most writing professionals, were
students of literature long before they became born-
again compositionists.2 Therefore it should not be
surprising that they invoke Romantic accounts of
creativity in support of their own theories about
writing. As noted in Chapter 5, Elbow invites students
to compare themselves to Coleridge's ancient mariner,
and both Berthoff and Elbow quote from the Bioaraphia.
In addition, Macrorie and Coles include sections from
The Prelude in their composition texts, suggesting to
students that Wordsworth's account of his developing
mind represents their own creative growth.3
These theorists have inherited a compelling
narrative about the writer from their Romantic
predecessors. Beginning with the publication of
Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge
constructed a mythic ideal of the poetic genius who
could control his readers without considering their
4
expectations. This genius myth came to exert a
powerful influence on the interpretation of literary
events in the Romantic Period, as writers claimed the
authority to establish new aesthetic conventions,
creating innovative works that challenged and even
offended British readers. Yet these assertions of
authorial power never went uncontested in the
nineteenth century, for literary critics created their
own versions of the genius myth to claim the authority
to restrain and guide the impulses of writers.
However, as the seminal texts of Romanticism were
canonized and placed in literary anthologies, they were
lifted from their social context, and the genius myth
passed into modern composition theory without being
accompanied by counter-assertions of the power of
readers.
This dissertation does not seek to establish the
complete historical connection between the Romantic
myth of genius and the legacy of these ideas in modern
composition theory. As explained in the Appendix, the
intellectual descent of the genius myth is complicated
and circuitous and would take us far afield. Instead,
my goal is to trace the development of this Romantic
myth, to analyze the forces that acted to modify and
counter it in the nineteenth century, and to compare it
with similar modern composition theories that encourage
students to ignore readers in search of their own
private composing power. Chapter 1 describes the
development of genius theory in the eighteenth century.
Chapter 2 argues that Wordsworth and Coleridge
transformed these neoclassical theories into two rival
versions of a new myth of poetic genius. The third
chapter traces the use of the genius myth in Romantic
literary reviews, arguing that critics developed a
system of checks and balances on Romantic poets.
Chapter 4 considers the crisis in author-reader
relations that erupted when Byron published the first
two cantos of Don Juan, which reviewers correctly
interpreted as the poet's effort to reassert his genius
on British readers. And the last chapter compares the
Romantic myth of genius with similar assumptions that
have resurfaced in the modern composition theories of
Ken Macrorie, William Coles, Ann Berthoff, and Peter
Elbow.
One note: though I would prefer to avoid sexist
language, for the sake of historical accuracy I use the
male pronoun when discussing eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century theories of the author as genius,
for until quite recently the prevailing wisdom
suggested that female genius was an oxymoronic
impossibility. A few Romantic reviewers were willing
to label an occasional woman writer as a genius;
6
however doubtless most would have been in hearty
agreement with Ernst Kretschmer, who stated
unequivocally in 1931 that true genius was an unhealthy
anomaly in females:
[T]he complex kind of intellectual
creativeness which is recognised
sociologically as 'genius' is very
largely confined to the male sex. . . .
Of course there are a few women who
perform, not indeed great acts of
genius, but yet indubitably original and
permanent creative works. . . . But the
great women achieved greatness— because
they were great men.4
7
NOTES
1. See Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Composition as a Human
Science, for a discussion of the competing metaphors
that govern rival composition theories and James A.
Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality for a history of such
disagreements in twentieth-century American colleges.
2. Ann Berthoff received an M.A. degree from Radcliffe
(1948) and retired in 1987 as a professor of English at
the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In the
latest Directory of American Scholars (published in
1982— a bit dated but still interesting), Berthoff
describes her fields of interest as English pedagogy,
philosophy of language, and Renaissance poetry. In
1970, she published The Resolved Soul: A Study of
Marvell's Manor Poems (Princeton UP); her freshman
writing text, Forming. Thinking. Writing, came out in
1978, and she produced a second revised edition with
James Stephens in 1988.
Ken Macrorie received a Ph.D. in English and
communication from Columbia University in 1955, and he
retired in 1978 from his position as a professor of
English at Western Michigan University. While
Macrorie1s later research was in composition and
communication, his M.A. thesis at the University of
North Carolina was entitled "Samuel Butler ... on the
Art of Writing" (Lindemann, "Ken Macrorie: A Review
Essay"). His high school composition textbook, Writing
to be Read, was published by Hayden in 1968; a similar
college writing text, Telling Writing, came out in
1970, and second, third, and fourth editions of this
popular book appeared in 1976, 1980, and 1985.
William Coles received a Ph.D. in English from the
University of Minnesota in 1967. He is a professor of
English at the University of Pittsburgh and lists his
research interests as the nineteenth century and the
teaching of writing. The first edition of his college
textbook Composing: Writing as a Self-Creative Process
appeared in 1974; a second edition followed in 1983.
Peter Elbow is a professor of English at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and received a
Ph.D. in English from Brandeis in 1969. Elbow has
published Oppositions in Chaucer (1975) and three books
on writing: Writing without Teachers (1973), Writing
with Power (1981), and Embracing Contraries (1986).
3. See Telling Writing 115 ("There was a boy . . .")
and Composing: Writing as a Self-Creative Process 11-12
("One summer evening [led by her] I found / A little
boat . . .").
8
4. Kretschmer 124, 126. As late as 1961 Andrew Gemant
concurred, arguing that "nearly always highly gifted
women, approaching in some degree the nature of a
genius, are masculine. . . . They are actually half
men, physically and mentally, their primary sexual
organs happening to be female" (114-15).
9
CHAPTER 1
GENIUS THEORY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Thyself so reverence as to prefer the
native growth of thy own mind to the
richest import from abroad; such
borrowed riches make us poor. The man
who thus reverences himself, will soon
find the world's reverence to follow his
own.
Edward Young, Conjectures
The English Romantics would decisively reject the
earlier neoclassical emphasis on rules, judgment, and
art in favor of a revolutionary aesthetic that
idealized creativity, imagination, and nature. Neither
of these theoretical paradigms was new. Indeed,
Western literary theorists since Plato and Aristotle
have tended to explain composition either as the result
of creative forces that arise from within the
individual speaker or writer, or as the enactment of a
set of social expectations that bind both authors and
audiences. In the century or so preceding the
publication of the first Romantic poetry in England,
the dominant aesthetic paradigm gradually began to
shift from social theories of writing toward a view
that composition is a personal, "natural" act. One
characteristic of this gradual aesthetic revolution was
an expansion of the concept of literary genius, along
with an increasing tendency to empower the author at
the expense of his readers. In the accumulating mass ^
of eighteenth-century theories of genius, the presumed
locus of literary control began to move from an
external system of rules to the internal genius of the
writer.
This shift in theoretical power occurred as real-
life literary relationships in Britain were undergoing
an equally profound transformation. Eighteenth-century
theorists themselves described their literary world as
a community in transition, in which existing aesthetic
expectations were being disrupted by inexpensive and
widespread publication and the growing purchasing power
of a literate audience that refused to bind itself by
aristocratic or academic standards. In the relatively
recent past, the British literary community had enjoyed
a degree of consensus that was possible only when it
was also limited in size and membership, so that a few
writers had produced literature for consumption by a
small set of familiar readers, who were well versed in
the assumptions encoded throughout the community1s
texts and were willing, for the most part, to
participate in traditional literary activities. Of
course, even the most stable of literary communities
11
experience change and conflict, since the potential for
conflict and change is built into all symbolic acts,
including creation and interpretation. Yet the
powerful economic and social forces that were acting on
England in the eighteenth century so accelerated change
and intensified conflict that even the relative
stability of the recent past receded into an
unattainable conservative ideal.
Looking back in 1702 on that recent era of
relative agreement, playwright and critic John Dennis
lamented the decline of English taste in the seventeen
years since the reign of Charles II, when "a
considerable part of an Audience were qualified to
judge for themselves, and . . . they who were not
qualified, were influenced by the authority of those
who were” (1: 290).1 As conservatives like Dennis
saw the situation, literature could continue to exist
in England only if the reading and play-going audience
that had been infiltrated by unqualified judges could
be reshaped by communal authority into a new audience
that was prepared once again to receive genuine works
of art.
Two major problems arose in putting this plan into
action: the difficulty of convincing an audience in
possession of both purchasing power and its own
opinions that it was, indeed, in need of instruction;
12
and the stark reality that, whatever the idealized past
had been, in the eighteenth century no clear,
authoritative voice could speak for the literary
community.
One strategy used by eighteenth-century theorists
in an attempt to regain literary consensus was to
develop theories of poetic genius that relocated
literary power in the hands of the author instead of
the general reading audience. These theories expanded
the rich existing concept of genius, which seemed to
promise a way to bridge the gap between individual
creativity and social judgment, for the term already
had connotative ties in both directions. Moreover, its
very ambiguity enabled writers, theorists, and critics
to use the term in performing a subtle rhetorical
sleight-of-hand, shifting imperceptibly from one
meaning to another in the course of an argument and
offering a flickering, ambiguous concept of genius in
place of any explanation they were unwilling or unable
to provide.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, genius
already carried several sets of meanings. First, it
could refer figuratively to a tutelary spirit guiding a
writer. In a second and larger group of meanings,
genius could be used to describe any unique quality,
ability, or bent that the theorist wished to assert was
13
inherent in and definitive of an individual, a corpus
of work, the literature of a nation or period, or even
a specific genre. Thus eighteenth-century theorists
could write of the genius that prompted one man to
enter the law, another to become a poet; they could
attempt to describe the genius of the Miltonic, as
opposed to the Homeric, epic; they could (and did)
argue that English literary genius was greater than the
French; and they could attempt to distill a genius of
comedy, an essential form necessary for all comic
productions. These related definitions of genius as
peculiarity imply the existence of innate qualities,
whether in writers, texts, communities, or genres,
which both govern literary production and shape the
experience of critical reading by inviting readers to
describe and compare essential similarities and
differences. While providing a framework for
interpretation, genius as peculiarity also afforded
strategic opportunities for ambiguity, since discussion
of the genius of Shakespearean drama might well leave
unsettled the question of whether certain elements of a
play were due to the playwright's unique authorial
gift, to the influence of his previous work, to the
fact that he wrote in a particular time and place, or
to the formal requirements of the genre he had chosen.
In a third group of related meanings, genius
increasingly was used to refer to the power wielded by
an author over an audience as the writer enraptured
readers, aroused their emotions, and transported them
to a private world of his own godlike making.2 Though
genius as peculiarity was used to describe the inherent
qualities of any writer, group, or genre, genius as
power was an evaluative term used to distinguish the
giants of the literary world from their lesser
colleagues, on the theoretical assumption that writers
of powerful genius possess a distinctive capacity to
reach through the words of the text to affect an
audience. Paradoxically, however, though this last
definition of genius referred to a power residing in
the writer, the judgment of that power necessarily
rested in the discerning, sensitive reader, usually the
critic himself, for authorial power needed to be
transmitted in the text and then enacted within an
audience before it could be described and evaluated.
The praise of a writer's powerful genius, then,
actually served also to empower the praise-giver, who
claimed the right to use personal reaction as the
measure of genius.
The eventual effect of this growing tendency to
equate genius with both authorial power and critical
evaluation of that power was to offer theoretical
support for literary experimentation, as long as these
experiments were validated in reviews of new published
works. Initially, eighteenth-century theorists
presumed that writers of genius would follow the
classical rules that had guided literary transactions
in the past. However, once theoretical power began to
shift in the direction of the writer, authorial genius
slowly gained ascendancy over rule, and the original
conservative impulse to deny scope for the judgment of
the ordinary reader ended as an investiture of near-
dictatorial powers in the poet/genius, provided that he
listened to his critical counselors.
During the eighteenth-century theorists studied
genius from four perspectives. Joseph Addison and
Edward Young created a putative history of genius to
understand its function in the primitive past and in
the civilized present. A second overlapping group of
theorists, including John Dennis, Shaftesbury,
Alexander Pope, and Edward Young, sought to create a
new aesthetic of genius that would teach writers how
they could gain access to the creative power of genius.
The psychologists of genius, Alexander Gerard and
William Duff, worked to understand its precise mental
mechanisms. Last, pedagogical theorists, including the
anonymous author of an article entitled "Of Genius,"
William Sharpe, and Hugh Blair, drew on the
16
accumulating history, aesthetic, and psychology of
genius in an attempt to improve British education. By
1780 a new consensus had arisen that literary genius is
an individual power, but one that must be named,
appreciated, and guided by critics.
History of Genius
One of the earliest elements of this new consensus
about genius was the creation of an idealized history
that critics could use to place new writers in the
context of existing literature. Eighteenth-century
historical theorists described modern genius as a
degeneration of the primitive creative powers of
ancient poets, who were supposed to have lived in a
world that was close to the natural springs of
invention. According to this theory, modern writers
must penetrate beneath the service of contemporary
social artifices and find a way to reconnect themselves
and their readers to the same natural sources of
creativity that had inspired Homer and Shakespeare.
Critics, in turn, are to judge the success or failure
of these attempts.
The tendency to equate antiquity with natural
genius grew stronger throughout the eighteenth century.
17
In the September 3, 1711, edition of The Spectator.
Addison theorized that there are two kinds of poetic
genius, a power of original literary creation, which he
associated with ancient writers, and a modern imitative
genius that builds on the work of others. Yet, though
Addison professed to find these two types of genius
equal in value, the energy of his own rhetoric revealed
a tacit preference for the ancient, original geniuses
"that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of
Art":
Among great Genius's, those few draw the
Admiration of all the World upon them,
and stand up as the Prodigies of
Mankind, who by the meer Strength of
natural Parts, and without any
Assistance of Art or Learning, have
produced Works that were the Delight of
their own Times and the Wonder of
Posterity. There appears something
nobly wild and extravagant in these
great natural Genius's, that is
infinitely more beautiful than all the
Turn and Polishing of what the French
call a Bel Esprit, by which they would
express a Genius refined by
Conversation, Reflection, and the
Reading of the most polite Authors.
(1: 126-27)
Obviously, these "nobly wild and extravagant" original
geniuses excited Addison's imagination far more than
those who have "submitted the Greatness of their
natural Talents to the Corrections and Restraints of
Art" (1: 129) .
18
Addison described composing in any age as a
balancing act between creativity and propriety.
Writers who pre-dated the establishment of a rule-
governed literary community were continually in danger
of allowing their creative genius to be overrun by its
flaws. However, Addison suggested that the most flawed
work of original genius is preferable to the cold
decorum of modern writers, who "would make some Amends
for our want of Force and Spirit, by a scrupulous
Nicety and Exactness in our Compositions" (1: 128).
In this prototypical history of genius, Addison
suggested a new professional standard for eighteenth-
century writers, who should emulate primitive geniuses
by allowing "full Play to their own natural Parts,"
while still paying sufficient heed to the literary
proprieties of their day. He gave critics new
responsibilities as well, for they were to measure the
genius of contemporary writers against the canonical
geniuses of the past. But, unlike conventional rules,
which could be codified, original genius would prove to
be a slippery aesthetic standard, one that demanded a
shared understanding of existing texts and the
acceptable means of creative deviation from them.
In Conjectures on Original Composition (1759),
Young admitted that originality is not an absolute
quality but exists relative to the reader's perception
of creativity and indebtedness. He noted that
imitative works of art can acquire the status of
originals as long as their earlier sources have been
lost: "They, tho' not real. are accidental Originals;
the works they imitated, few excepted are lost: They,
on their Father's Decease, enter, as lawful Heirs, on
their Estates in Fame" (10). Young accepted, that is,
the fact that the vagaries of textual preservation may
make originality and imitation indistinguishable, even
to the most discerning of readers. What is most
important is not the historical actuality of original
work but a belief that this originality was real.
Attempting to free his readers from the search for
absolute standards of originality, Young also tried to
free writers from enslavement to the standards of the
ancients: "Too great Awe for them lays Genius under
restraint, and denies it that free scope, that full
elbow-room, which is requisite for striking its most
masterly strokes" (15). Like Addison, he enjoined
writers to seek the sources of originality within their
own breasts, rather than in the texts of others; also
like Addison, he offered confused modern writers little
direction in just how to accomplish such a feat. When
theorists came to describe composition as an internal
quest, they also described it as a lonely act, one that
was supposed to lead to a unique spring of truth within
20
the self. As Harold Bloom would note much later in The
Anxiety of Influence, modern writers searching for
uniqueness must engage in an Oedipal struggle to murder
the symbolic paternalism of the past. Similarly, Young
enjoins writers to—
treat even Homer himself, as his royal
Admirer was treated by the Cynic; bid
him stand aside, nor shade our
Composition from the beams of our own
Genius; for nothing Original can rise,
nothing Immortal can ripen, in any other
Sun. (12-13)
An Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic of Genius
Just as an idealized history of genius was
encouraging writers to value their own originality over
the standards bequeathed by the past, a growing
eighteenth-century aesthetic of genius encouraged them
to see writing primarily as an act of self-exploration
rather than the art of affecting an audience.
Increasingly, theorists described original aesthetic
writing as the highest form of composition, one that
issues from an internal source of creativity and truth,
unlike directly rhetorical works aimed at fulfilling
reader expectations. During the eighteenth century,
these theorists came to equate literary power with
genius and nature rather than art, so that the most
21
powerful texts were believed to be produced by geniuses
who insist on satisfying themselves rather than
following standards set by others.
Like the identification of genius with primitive
creativity, the theoretical empowerment of the author
grew stronger during the century. Dennis found nothing
unnatural about the observance of rules and continued
to insist over a long career that a knowledge of
established literary precepts was essential for both
writer and reader. Indeed, he argued in 1698 that "the
Rules of Aristotle are but Directions for the
Observation of Nature," so that the writer who most
closely follows these rules will be most certain to
please, "[i]t being undeniable that the Writer, who
follows Nature closest, is certain to please most."
Further, Dennis argued that "it is as impossible for
any Man who has not a great Genius, strictly to observe
the Rules; as it is for any one who has not super
natural Assistance to live up to the Dictates of
Reason" (1:96).
Having anchored authorial genius firmly in the
solid ground of "natural" rules, however, Dennis went
on to describe literary genius as the ability to use
ordinary human emotions to fuel a kind of mental
transport. According to Dennis, instead of
experiencing common emotions in a limited way, geniuses
22
use passion as a platform from which their intellects
can soar towards the sublime. Thus, when a great
writer conceives an "extraordinary hint," a thought or
an image so vast that it cannot be fully comprehended
by the human mind, the very consciousness of
entertaining such a vast and incomprehensible idea
moves the thinker, his "Soul is transported upon [the
extraordinary hint], by the consciousness of its own
excellence, and it is exalted, . . . and ... if the
hint be very extraordinary, the Soul is amazed by the
unexpected view of its own surpassing power"
(1: 46-47).
Dennis seemed well aware of the potential for
anarchy in situating genius in emotional experience,
and his equal emphasis on rules was designed to anchor
personal aesthetic events in the literary community.
Hence, while describing genius as the writer's
passionate power, Dennis insisted that such power be
bound by rules, or, more precisely, he argued that only
adherence to rules could unleash the natural power of
genius. Moreover, concerned about the deteriorating
judgment of the newly expanded eighteenth-century
audience, Dennis also insisted that readers and play
goers needed the guidance of experienced critics— like
Dennis himself— to guide them away from their own
untutored opinions toward the true standards of art.
23
Just as he argued that rules would free the natural
genius of writers, he held that adherence to rules
would enhance the aesthetic pleasure of all readers and
play-goers, including ignorant newcomers to theater and
books. For Dennis asserted that he knew better than
audiences themselves what they would really prefer to
see and read: "by pleasing the best Judges, [poetry]
will infallibly please the rest, and please them more
than it could have done, if the others had not been
satisfied." Naive audiences may indeed be initially
amused by unworthy art, but Dennis argued that such
shallow amusement could not be longlasting, since "if
the best Judges, and those who have a true tast are
disgusted, the rest will quickly be cloy'd" (1: 71).
Dennis suggested that true genius would discover
itself most fully and be most fully appreciated when
both authors and audiences were guided by the rules of
art, as explained by critics like himself. According
to Dennis's aesthetic of genius, it is the critic who
makes the modern literary process possible by
delineating a set of community standards based on
nature. Shaftesbury, on the other hand, believed that
the ailing eighteenth-century literary community would
only recover its former strength when poets healed
themselves by engaging in a process of self-discovery
before they began writing their texts. To describe
2 4
this process, Shaftesbury drew on the ancient Roman
belief "[t]hat we have each of us a daemon, angel, or
guardian-spirit, to whom we were strictly joined and
committed from our earliest dawn of reason, or moment
of our birth" (1: 112). According to Shaftesbury,
every writer possesses such a guide, a second or
"better self" (1: 183) that must be separated from the
lesser self in order to heal the soul (1: 112). It is
essential for a writer to recognize that he is both his
own "pupil and preceptor" (1: 105), a "venerable sage"
and a "base and servile" underling (1: 112). Only then
will he know how to "play the critic on himself, or
regulate his style or language by the standard of good
company, and people of the better sort" (1: 110).
Shaftesbury held that authors can prevent external
criticism if they create an internal genius that will
teach them to criticize themselves.3 Most
importantly, he argued that such self-creation must
take place before the actual production of a text. If
an author has failed to create a harmonious self that
is guided by an internal genius, the act of writing can
only serve to discharge his intellectual humours:
'Tis observable that the writers of
memoirs and essays are chiefly subject
to this frothy distemper. Nor can it be
doubted that this is the true reason why
these gentlemen entertain the world so
lavishly with what relates to
themselves. For having had no
25
opportunity of privately conversing with
themselves, or exercising their own
genius so as to make acquaintance with
it or prove its strength, they
immediately fall to work in a wrong
place, and exhibit on the stage of the
world that practice which they should
have kept to themselves, if they
designed that either they or the world
should be the better for their
moralities. (1: 108-09)
According to Shaftesbury, disunified authors intrude
the self into texts in an attempt to manipulate
readers. Real rhetorical power, on the other hand,
comes from the internal control of genius, for, "having
gained a mastery" internally, writers "may easily, with
the help of their genius and a right use of art,
command their audience and establish a good taste"
(1: 181).
Shaftesbury viewed genius as a means of gaining
internal control over nature that would give authors an
equal measure of indirect control over readers.
Alexander Pope and Edward Young further developed this
new aesthetic of genius, agreeing with Shaftesbury that
the best way to affect an audience is to consult the
self rather than others. Unlike Shaftesbury, however,
Pope and Young identified genius with nature rather
than art. In the introduction to his translation of
the Iliad (1715), Pope argued that genius is synonymous
with invention and with nature:
26
It is the Invention that in different
degrees distinguishes all great
Genius's: The utmost Stretch of human
Study, Learning, and Industry, which
masters every thing besides, can never
attain to this. It furnishes Art with
all her Materials, and without it
Judgment itself can at best but steal
wisely: For Art is only like a prudent
Steward that lives on managing the
Riches of Nature. (1: 22 3)
Demoting art to the auxiliary status of nature's
steward, Pope suggested that critics who prefer tamely
harmonious texts reveal their own limitations rather
than fairly judging the luxuriant creative growth that
is typical of genius:
[Pjerhaps the reason why most Criticks
are inclin'd to prefer a judicious and
methodical Genius to a great and
fruitful one, is, because they find it
easier for themselves to pursue their
Observations through an uniform and
bounded Walk of Art, than to comprehend
the vast and various Extent of Nature.
(1: 224)
Despite the existence of such critical nay-sayers, Pope
agreed with Shaftesbury that true genius has a powerful
rhetorical effect on an audience, enthralling readers
with its natural vitality and bounteous mental
creations, while art merely satisfies critical demands
for order. According to Pope, reading works of genius
is rather like being consumed by an overwhelming fire.
Echoing Longinus, he declared:
27
It is to the Strength of this amazing
Invention we are to attribute that
unequal'd Fire and Rapture, which is so
forcible in Homer. that no Man of a true
Poetical Spirit is Master of himself
while he reads him. . . . The Course of
his Verses resembles that of the Army he
describes, . . . They pour along like a
Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before
it. (1: 224-25)
Apparently Pope believed that if genius is
powerful enough, it will win over most readers despite
their initial misgivings. The ideal literary
transaction, in Pope's aesthetic theory, is one which
is dominated by the power of the poet-genius. And yet
the critical reader retains a measure of control in
this aesthetic system, for if genius is defined as
mastery over readers, then readers can claim the
ultimate right to judge genius for themselves. For
authors may not proclaim themselves as geniuses but
must await the enactment of their inventions in the
minds of others before that genius may be established.
And critics have the right to decide when they will lay
down their fault-finding pens and let the genius of an
author overwhelm them.
In Conjectures on Original Composition. Edward
Young expanded on the aesthetic theories of his
predecessors, making an even stronger argument that
composition is an internal act of genius with indirect,
though no less powerful, rhetorical effects. According
28
to Young, the purpose of literature is to enable both
writers and readers to escape the care-laden world and
withdraw into a "sweet Refuge," a private literary
sanctum, where "Our Happiness no longer lives on
Charity" but reigns "in the little World, the minute
but fruitful Creation, of [our] own mind[s]" (5-6).
This internal literary world is pleasurable
precisely because it is independent of external
reality, containing the original creations of the
author as reenacted in the mind of the reader. As
noted earlier, Young admitted that originality resists
precise definition and must be judged relative to
existing texts. Nevertheless, he also held that
originals and imitations arise from inherently
different creative processes. "An Original." he
stated, "may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it
rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it
grows. is not made," while "Imitations are often a sort
of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics. Art. and
Labour. out of pre-existent materials not their own"
(8-9).
According to Young's aesthetic theory, only
inferior imitations can be crafted, while works of
genius take root and grow inside the mind of the
writer. Clearly, however, readers must also be willing
to receive and appreciate such original creations, a
task made doubly difficult by the fact that original
works may fail to follow familiar rules and
conventional expectations. Young even ventured to
submit that lack of appreciation may furnish proof of
genius, which "often . . . deserves most to be praised,
when it is most sure to be condemned; that is, when its
Excellence, from mounting high, to weak eyes is quite
out of sight" (17).
At the same time Young agreed with Pope that the
clearest indication of original genius is its
rhetorical impact on an audience. He described that
impact, however, as an aesthetic trance to which
readers submit, but from which they must inevitably
awaken;
[I]f an Original. by being as excellent,
as new, adds admiration to surprize,
then are we at the Writer's mercy; on
the strong wing of his Imagination, we
are snatched from Britain to Italy. from
Climate to Climate, from Pleasure to
Pleasure; we have no Home, no Thought,
of our own; 'till the Magician drops his
Pen: And then falling down into
ourselves, we awake to flat Realities,
lamenting the change, like the Beggar
who dreamt himself a Prince. (9)
Young's own description of the rhetorical power of
genius makes it clear that such authorial demands are
always counter-balanced by the reader's reluctance to
cede control of his mind to an intruder.4 True works
of genius transport the reader to the author's own
30
created world. But once the actual experience of
reading a text has ended, critics can disengage
themselves from the spell of genius and reexert their
own judgment, so that submission is only a prelude to
critical discourse.
By the mid-eighteenth century, a new aesthetic of
genius was firmly entrenched in English literary
theory, one that placed the primary power for
controlling literary interactions in the writer. A
consensus was emerging that, at least for authors of
great genius, writing is an act that originates in the
interior passions and imagination of the writer, not in
the literary expectations of the community; that
composing is a process of both self-integration and
self-obliteration; that genius is too original,
impetuous, and bold to pay attention to the details of
correctness; and that interior acts of genius may
nevertheless result in a commanding power over the
reader. At the same time, by defining genius as
indirect rhetorical power, these theorists preserved an
important role for the professional critics who test
the genius of an author's words in their own hearts.
31
Eiqhteenth-Centurv Psychologies of Genius
By the time Young published Conjectures on
Original Composition in 1759, the eighteenth-century
literary community had a new reigning paradigm for
understanding the history and aesthetics of genius. It
was a logical extension of this growing body of theory
for psychologists to attempt to explain the exact
mental mechanisms of genius. Two Scottish theorists,
Alexander Gerard and William Duff, applied
associationist psychology to the problem of genius, and
in the process of trying to achieve a scientific
understanding of genius placed even further emphasis on
the writer and his godlike creative and rhetorical
power.
In An Essay on Taste (1759) and An Essay on Genius
(1774) Gerard argued that genius is an exceptional
mental ability to associate and imagine ideas. Like
Pope and Young, he equated genius, invention, and
imagination, explaining that "The first and leading
quality of genius is invention, which consists in a
great extent and comprehensiveness of imagination, in a
readiness of associating the remotest ideas that are
any way related" (Essay on Taste 168). According to
Gerard, this readily associative power that belongs to
32
genius begins with a single intense moment of
intellectual generation:
In a man of genius, the uniting
principles are so vigorous and quick,
that, whenever any idea is present to
the mind, they bring into view at once
all others that have the least connexion
with it. As the magnet selects, from a
quantity of matter, the ferruginous
particles which happen to be scattered
through it, without making an impression
on other substances; so imagination, by
a similar sympathy, equally
inexplicable, draws out from the whole
compass of nature such ideas as we have
occasion for, without attending to any
others; and yet presents them with as
great propriety, as if all possible
conceptions had been explicitly exposed
to our view, and subjected to our
choice. (Essay on Taste 168-69)
Gerard's magnetic metaphor for the initial
associative moment of genius implies that this moment
is both complete and automatic— the imagination draws
out proper ideas "as if all possible conceptions had
been . . . subjected to our choice," while actually the
selection process is faster than if the genius were to
sort through the materials one by one and choose those
that are germane. Further, this process of genius is
so selective that it produces no irrelevant ideas among
the useful materials it generates. According to
Gerard, genius is a process of orderly creation; it
begins with an instantaneous selection of "a confused
heap of materials, collected by fancy"; then "genius,
33
after repeated reviews and transpositions, designs a
regular and well-proportioned whole" (Essay on Taste
169) .
In An Essav on Genius. Gerard further argued that
under ideal circumstances "genius arranges its ideas by
the same operation, and almost at the same time, that
it collects them," for slow and deliberate judgment
"would greatly impede the work of genius, retard its
progress, or stop it altogether. . . . (89). Moreover,
he asserted that it is infinitely preferable, not just
to edit flaws and weak associations out of a text, but
to avoid them in the first place:
The truest genius is in hazard of
sometimes running into superfluities,
and will find occasion to prune the
luxuriance, and rectify the disorder of
its first conceptions. But this faculty
can never be reckoned perfect, till it
has acquired a capacity of avoiding them
in most cases. (Essav on Genius 54)
That is, according to Gerard the best writing demands
little or no rewriting, for the judgment has so trained
the imagination that it "enures the mind to move
straight forward to the end proposed, without declining
into the bye-paths which run off on both sides" (Essav
on Genius 81).
This eighteenth-century theory that genius is the
automatic functioning of a perfect associative force
highlighted the individual writer, but it also tended
34
to downplay the element of authorial choice. Gerard
described genius in scientific terms as an impersonal
creative ideal.5 However, despite its impersonality,
key elements of this psychological ideal would be
preserved in the Romantic myth of the poet-genius who
creates organically unified texts without the necessity
of revision.
Gerard argued that ideal genius functions
instantaneously to create a unified work of art. His
fellow psychologist William Duff, on the other hand,
taught that genius remains an inherently divided
psychological operation, owing its power to the
combined efforts and mutual regulation of the mental
faculties of imagination, judgment, and taste.6 In
Duff's scheme, the imagination invents, judgment
supplies order, and taste corrects the subtler flaws
that arise in composition. Thus, according to Duff,
these three faculties ought to keep a continual watch
on one another. For example, "the discerning and
coercive power of judgment should mark and restrain the
excursions of a wanton imagination . . ." (8).
Duff understood the rhetorical power of genius as
a result of the combined effect of imagination,
judgment, and taste working together to give a text
control over its readers and their own mental
faculties:
35
The effect of the union of these
qualities in composition, will be
observed and felt by every reader. . . .
Hence, in the writings of an author who
possesses the qualities above mentioned
in a high degree, we are convinced,
pleased, or affected, according to the
various strain of his composition, as it
is adapted to the understanding, the
imagination, or the heart. (21-22)
In separating the mental operations of genius into the
various faculties, Duff sought to give readers a set of
critical tools to use in explaining the effects and
evaluating the worth of a work of art. He also
distinguished the operations of genius, wit and humor:
. . . Genius is characterised by a
copious and plastic, as well as a vivid
and extensive Imagination; by which
means it is equally qualified to invent
and create, or to conceive and describe
in the most lively manner the objects it
contemplates. ... On the other hand,
Wit and Humour neither invent nor
create; they neither possess the vigour,
the compass, nor the plastic power of
the other quality. Their proper
province is to assemble with alertness
those sentiments and images, which may
excite pleasantry or ridicule. (47-48)
By carefully differentiating these "offspring of
the same parent," the faculty Duff interchangeably
called fancy or imagination, he seemed to be moving
toward making a distinction between fancy and
imagination: wit and humor, he wrote, "are produced by
the efforts of a r a m b l i n g and s p o r t i v e Fancy," while
genius "proceeds from the copious effusions of a
36
plastic Imagination” (52). Such fine-grained
distinctions were aimed at helping critics illuminate
the works of genius. Ordinary readers would be moved
by genius without knowing why. Critics, on the other
hand, could examine literary texts with scientific
care, analyzing poems and their effect on an audience
according to mental faculties.
This psychology of genius, then, produced a set of
critical and evaluative terms to describe the exact
kind and degree of authorial power a genius exerted on
his audience. Gerard and Duff constructed a reasoned
psychological framework to explain the process of the
inventive genius that had been poetically praised by
Addison, Pope, and Young. The combined result of their
theories was to describe writing as a private mental
process that produces a rhetorically powerful text.
These associationists elevated genius; however, they
also described it as a natural power that works through
a writer instead of operating under his control.
Moreover, they implied that it is the psychologist and
later the critic who define and analyze genius. Once
again, the increasing eighteenth-century focus on
authorial control also contained subversive limits on
that power.
37
Eighteenth-Century Pedagogies of Genius
Along with an accumulating history, aesthetic, and
psychology of genius, eighteenth-century theorists also
directed their attention to constructing a pedagogy
that would reflect their changing ideas of what genius
is and how it operates. But genius theory, as it was
maturing in the eighteenth century, posed some basic
problems for educational theorists when they attempted
to transfer this body of theory to classroom
situations. Literary genius was increasingly defined
as an unusual set of mental abilities that enable a
great writer either to intuit the rules of literature
without having learned them in school, or to create
standards of his own that are more natural and powerful
than those taught in the educational system. Edward
Young, for one, argued that such independent
achievement is a principal identifying characteristic
of genius:
for what, for the most part, mean we by
Genius, but the Power of accomplishing
great things without the means generally
reputed necessary to that end? A Genius
differs from a good Understanding, as a
Magician from a good Architect; That
raises his structure by means invisible;
This by the skilful use of common tools.
Hence Genius has ever been supposed to
partake of something Divine. (16)
It was difficult to imagine formulating a pedagogy
that could benefit the independent genius as well as
common students, who presumably require more direct
education in the standards of art. Educators could
consider genius a rare occurrence, entrust it to its
own devices, and concentrate on inculcating rules in
ordinary students. But, as genius came to be
identified with nature rather than art, some theorists
began uneasily to question whether British education
was nurturing the natural gifts of any of its students
or was only succeeding in discouraging whatever innate
creativity they possessed.
Moreover, even when it was agreed that schools
have the responsibility of teaching literary rules,
educators were in approximately the same predicament as
eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists: finding a
universal set of standards in a changing and divided
literary community. Increasingly, aesthetic theorists
placed the responsibility for creating standards on the
genius-writer, while critical readers were supposed to
guide and evaluate genius according to their responses
to his texts. But who would set the standards for the
greater body of student writers, if each student could
not be trusted to create his own literary rules?
Three very different pedagogical theorists
attempted to find solutions to these problems of
39
reconciling natural gifts with the environment of the
classroom. In 1719 an anonymous author published an
essay entitled "Of Genius" in The Occasional Paper,
arguing for a broad definition of genius to include the
natural inclinations of all men to one form of
employment or another. This author believed the
eighteenth-century community to be in an educational
crisis caused by the practice of ignoring inborn
predilections:
Indeed it is too common an Unhappiness
for Men to be so placed, as to have no
Opportunity and Advantage for shewing
their Genius. As Matters are generally
managed in the World, Men are for the
most part staked down to such Business,
in such Alliances, or in such
Circumstances, that they have no proper
Occasions of exerting themselves; but
instead of that, are continually tugging
and striving with things that are cross
and ungrateful to them. (29)
According to this article, genius is frequently
precluded from filling its natural role by an unfeeling
educational and social system. Like a gravitational
pull, genius propels a man toward his rightful work;
it is a combination of "the natural Force of Power with
which every Being is indued; . . . together with the
particular Inclination of the Mind, towards any
Business, or Study, or Way of Life" (5). Both these
elements of genius are required "to make a Man shine in
any Station or Employment," since "Nothing considerable
can be done against the Grain, ... in spite of Power
and Inclination" (5). Hence, human genius develops
best when its individual bent is recognized and
education provides the additional force to help
students follow their own natural inclinations.
Moreover, this author argued that when educators
encourage individual genius to blossom, both
individuals and society will benefit, because nature
has organized a social world in which every individual
genius can contribute to the well-being of the whole
(7-8).
The second pedagogical theorist of genius in the
eighteenth century was the obscure curate William
Sharpe, who published A Dissertation upon Genius in
1755. Like the anonymous author who wrote "Of Genius,"
Sharpe was not content to describe genius as a rare
natural attribute. However, instead of arguing that
all men possess a genius for one occupation or another,
Sharpe drew on Locke to argue that genius is always the
product of learning and experience rather than any
unique natural endowment. Though this environmental
theory of genius ran counter to the growing eighteenth-
century emphasis on genius as natural creative power,
it would nevertheless persist as part of the movement
for modern democratic educational reform.
Sharpe was well aware that he was in the minority
in ascribing genius to the effects of acquisition.
That genius is "inherent in nature," he wrote, was "an
universally received opinion" (3). Nevertheless,
Sharpe, like Locke, believed that all human beings
possess the same basic natural mental equipment, a
tabula rasa that lies ready to be filled with ideas;
according to this theory, then, genius must be acquired
after birth as a child grows and his slate begins to be
filled with ideas gathered from sensation and
reflection. Genius, then, is no great natural gift of
imagination or invention, no inborn literary power, but
is instead an acquired "capacity of improvement" that
is unequally given only to those who chance to interact
with an environment that fosters such abilities.
Sharpe's theory of genius led him to argue that
any human can achieve the status of a genius with the
assistance of nurturing educational environment. He
insisted on the universal mental equality of human
infants, and argued that even the most complex
reflective powers of the mind are acquired, not inborn:
It remains . . . that this very kind of
ingenuity must proceed from habit and
acquisition; and that, wherever we find
an example of eminent Genius in any
distinct branch of science, he has had
adscititious helps, either by precept or
by accident, during his employment in
the study of it, and before he first
engaged in this work, he had catch'd a
42
taste for it, 'tis likely, from some
Carpenter, some almanack, some garden,
some humourist or mountebank, (as his
favourite taste shall happen) has taken
every low opportunity and means to
improve his stock, and husbanded his
original little so well as to increase
it into a qualification for a settled
study or profession. (57-58)
In place of any inborn occupational bent, Sharpe
described a social world dominated by happenstance, as
its most expert learners, its geniuses, first "catch'd
a taste" for one kind of work or study and proceeded to
use "every low opportunity and means" to steep
themselves in the mental processes required of their
chosen profession. Since Sharpe credited genius to the
environment, it seemed obvious to him that changes in
education should produce better learning and easier
acquisition of knowledge. The proper goal of
education, he argued, is to assist the individual by
instilling ideas in an orderly fashion. Students fail,
not because they lack inherent ability, but either
because their teacher is inept or because some factor
in their early environment has prevented them from
learning how to learn (67-68).
By accepting an environmental theory of learning,
Sharpe was pleading for better educational instruction
and was at the same time forced to admit that neither a
schoolmaster nor a parent can completely control a
child's learning environment:
43
Alasi in years of childhood, even from
the cradle, Genius is taking its bent
and moulding into form by a thousand
imperceptible ways and means, which we
are neither aware of our selves, nor can
possibly discover in others; reason
opens her shell, and peeps out upon day
light by the opportunity of every little
suggestion, conversation, or
observation. (69)
Moreover, he saw learning as a lifetime pursuit, in
which the deficiencies of childhood education could be
at least partially remedied by the willing adult
learner. Hence, he placed the final responsibility for
education on the individual: "every man," he wrote,
"is, if not the founder, yet the refiner and polisher,
of his own Genius; he can suspend or invigorate its
applications at pleasure, and make it rise to
importance, or let it sink into insignificancy" (129).
After Sharpe's treatise on genius was long
forgotten, the tendency to emphasize human similarity
rather than difference would live on. Like Sharpe,
modern democratic reformers emphasize the potential of
all students to learn, given educational environments
that are responsive to their various needs, and they
tend to define academic failure in terms of inadequate
home, community, or school support rather than
ascribing failure to any fundamental inequality in
student abilities. Yet the tendency to equate genius
with innate ability would prove far more powerful than
44
Sharpe's heretical theory of environmental learning.
The most influential composition theorist of the
eighteenth century, Hugh Blair, accepted the prevailing
doctrine of natural genius and devised a curriculum
that would help students acquire the mental abilities
he believed were improvable, while leaving innate
genius to follow its own developmental path. Blair's
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were given at
the University of Edinburgh between 1759 and 1783, and
published after his retirement; as he noted in his
preface, "They were originally designed for the
initiation of Youth into the study of Belles Lettres,
and of Composition" (1: iv). The practicality of this
curriculum undoubtedly had much to do with its
immediate popularity and its long-term effects on
English curriculum. During the next ninety years,
Blair's lectures were reprinted in sixty-two complete
editions and fifty-one abridgments and dominated
rhetoric classrooms in both Britain and the United
States (Golden 95).
Blair believed that the basic foundation of
writing ability is natural genius, which lies outside
the province of the university lecture hall. He
maintained, however, that hard work also plays an
important role; "Nature has, indeed, conferred upon
some a very favourable distinction in this respect,
beyond others. But in these, as in most other talents
she bestows, she has left much to be wrought out by
every man's own industry" (1: 7). It is the
responsibility of every student, then, to improve what
natural abilities he possesses through his own
industrious application. The rhetoric teacher cannot
supply his students with genius, nor can he remedy any
deficiency in their industry. He can, however, teach
them a system of basic rhetorical rules and principles:
I by no means pretend to say that mere
rhetorical rules, how just soever, are
sufficient to form an orator. Supposing
natural genius to be favourable, more by
a great deal will depend upon private
application and study, than upon any
system of instruction that is capable of
being publicly communicated. But at the
same time, though rules and instructions
cannot do all that is requisite, they
may, however do much that is of real
use. They cannot, it is true, inspire
genius; but they can direct and assist
it. (1: 7-8)
Blair carefully defined the limits he considered
appropriate for composition instruction. He argued
that the university can control neither genius nor
"private application and study"; he also placed
invention outside the proper sphere of rhetoric, which
he reduced to matters of polish and style. "Knowledge
and science," according to Blair, "must furnish the
materials that form the body and substance of any
valuable composition," while "Rhetoric serves to add
46
the polish; and we know that none but firm and solid
bodies can be polished well'1 (1: 5-6) .
Blair emphasized rules more strongly than did his
contemporary theorists, for rules are preeminently
teachable, and he concentrated his curricular theory on
what can be taught. As he described it, a rhetorical
and literary education prepares students to communicate
and receive communication in a modern literate society,
as well as helping them to assume a higher social
status. Teachers can also improve their students'
taste, enabling them to appreciate literature and
refine whatever genius for composition they might
possess (1: 20). The truly original genius might not
require such a critical education; however, according
to Blair, this curriculum should help the majority of
students make the most of the natural abilities they
possess.
Conclusion
By the end of the eighteenth century, genius,
which began as an ambiguous critical term, had been
developed into a network of theories about its history,
aesthetics, psychology, and pedagogical applications.
The strongest trend was to identify genius with nature,
47
invention, the imagination, and, most of all, the
individual writer's power to define his own standards
and exert an overpowering control over his readers. On
the other hand, this trend toward authorial domination
was accompanied by a countering force in the form of
the continuing insistence that texts require
professional response before their authors be judged as
geniuses. In addition, classical rules continued to
dominate literary and rhetorical curricula, providing
external measures for student production and criticism
of texts. Though the author was granted a considerable
amount of power in most eighteenth-century theories of
genius, whenever rules still seemed relevant to
critical judgment or pedagogy, they were invoked. Thus
the nineteenth century would inherit a set of genius
theories that both explicitly privileged the author and
implicitly insisted that external judgment plays an
important role in evaluating and producing writing.
48
NOTES
1. Dennis's editor, Edward Niles Hooker, notes, "The
fact that up to this point not one of his plays had
succeeded, may help to explain in part his attitude
toward contemporary taste" (1: 491) .
2. The association of genius with the rhetorical
ability to overcome an audience, sublimity, and flaws
stretches back at least as far as Longinus, who argued
that sublimity "tears everything up like a whirlwind,
and exhibits the orator's whole power at a single blow"
("On Sublimity" 462).
3. Peter Elbow would also argue in the late twentieth
century that writers need to separate their critical
from their generative selves. Elbow's goal, however,
would be to help writers avoid blocking invention by
censoring their words too early. Shaftesbury's main
concern, on the other hand, was that writers will fail
to criticize their own works at all.
4. Clifford Siskin argues in The Historicity of
Romantic Discourse that a careful reading of Young
demonstrates that this eighteenth-century theorist is
not as Romantic as might be suggested by his liberal
use of words like genius and original. As Siskin
points out, Young frequently invokes these terms only
to "domesticate" them as vehicles for critical
hierarchies or religious orthodoxy (96-99).
5. Louise Phelps categorizes composition theories as
those based on artistic, natural, or scientific world
views (Composition as a Human Science). Applying this
system to Gerard and Duff, both these psychologists
might be said to work within a scientific paradigm, but
one that was ostensibly designed to uphold a natural
view of writing.
6. In An Essay on Taste Gerard described taste as a
necessary adjunct to genius, arguing that genius "needs
the assistance of taste, to guide and moderate its
exertions" (171). By the time he wrote An Essay on
Genius, however, he had largely assigned this auxiliary
function to judgment.
49
CHAPTER 2
THE MYTHIC GENIUS OP LYRICAL BALLADS
[W]hat a small quantity of brain is
necessary to procure a considerable
stock of admiration, provided the
aspirant will accommodate himself to the
likings and fashions of his day.
Wordsworth
By the late eighteenth century, theories of
literary genius argued for an effective balance of
power between original writers and their critics.
Authors of genius were said to possess the power to
dominate and transport readers; critics, on the other
hand, considered themselves to be professional literary
responders, using their reactions as a means of
distinguishing among the truly innovative, the merely
conventional, and the shallow popular works of the day.
Thus, as consensus about aesthetic principles
deteriorated, claims about literary worth tended to
shift from appeals to a set of rules operating outside
texts and prior to composition, toward validation in
private enactments of meaning inside the author and
trained reader.
During the early nineteenth century, claims for
both the authorial power of genius and the necessity
for critical evaluation grew stronger. Writers and
readers came to be separated by an even wider gulf than
their eighteenth-century predecessors had been. As Jon
Klancher notes:
The late eighteenth century ushered in a
confusing, unsettled world of reading
and writing. Ideas, signs, and styles
had to cross new cultural and social
boundaries, and the status consciousness
of the eighteenth century was already
becoming the class awareness of the
nineteenth. No single, unified "reading
public" could be addressed in such
times, as Coleridge and his
contemporaries well knew. This inchoate
cultural moment compelled a great many
writers to shape the interpretive and
ideological frameworks of audiences they
would speak to. (3)
In this "inchoate cultural moment," the complex and
ambiguous concept of genius seemed to promise a
theoretical means of defining literary relationships
and effectively shaping the "interpretive and
ideological frameworks" that early nineteenth-century
audiences brought to texts. In poems and the prefaces,
appendices, and notes that accompanied them, writers
could obliquely assert the original genius of their own
work; critics, on the other hand, used reviews of new
publications to claim their own power to discern true
poetic originality and refute the false pretensions of
51
upstart authors. Literary works that departed from
previous norms, therefore, were frequently surrounded
by a combative exchange of claims and counter-claims
about genius and originality.
One such work was Lyrical Ballads, with a few
other Poems, which appeared anonymously in 1798. The
first edition of this slender volume of twenty-three
poems was prefaced by an advertisement, added late in
the publication process by Wordsworth, and it was this
advertisement, as much as the poems themselves, that
initiated a long-running Romantic debate about genius,
the nature of poetry, and literary authority. The 1798
reader might have expected the advertisement to clarify
what the unknown (and presumably singular) poet meant
by a "lyrical ballad," which poems among the twenty-
three were to be counted as such, and which were the
"few other poems" described in the title. Instead,
this brief introduction issued a strong argument for
the poet's authority to define literature and educate
readers in the proper response to poetic texts.
The advertisement began its lesson to readers with
a flat pronouncement about the true nature of poetry:
It is the honourable characteristic of
Poetry that its materials are to be
found in every subject which can
interest the human mind. The evidence
of this fact is to be sought, not in the
writings of Critics, but in those of
Poets themselves. (LB 7)
Wordsworth was arguing for an unconventionally broad
conception of the proper subject matter of poetry, and
he based this theoretical claim on his own authority as
a poet. Glossing over the fact that poets disagree
about theory as much as critics do, he declared the
poet solidly in possession of the power to define
poetry, so that the theorizing power in regard to the
text at hand was vested in his own explanation of its
purpose and worth. He warned that those accustomed to
the prevailing poetic standards might well find these
poems so unexpected as to be unpleasant:
The majority of the following poems are
to be considered as experiments. They
were written chiefly with a view to
ascertain how far the language of
conversation in the middle and lower
classes of society is adapted to the
purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers
accustomed to the gaudiness and inane
phraseology of many modern writers, if
they persist in reading this book to its
conclusion, will perhaps frequently have
to struggle with feelings of strangeness
and aukwardness: they will look round
for poetry, and will be induced to
enquire by what species of courtesy
these attempts can be permitted to
assume that title. (7)
Wordsworth justified this project, then, as
experimental, and he invited his audience to join him
in trying these poems against a new standard of natural
language. He suggested to any disconcerted readers
that they would be well served by suspending judgment
until they could learn to apply a truer test of poetry
than the familiar and expected forms of eighteenth-
century verse:
It is desirable that such readers, for
their own sakes, should not suffer the
solitary word Poetry, a word of very
disputed meaning, to stand in the way of
their gratification; but that, while
they are perusing this book, they should
ask themselves if it contains a natural
delineation of human passions, human
characters, and human incidents; and if
the answer be favourable to the author's
wishes, that they should consent to be
pleased in spite of that most dreadful
enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-
established codes of decision. (7;
emphasis added)
Wordsworth was asserting outright, as had Dennis,
that readers are not necessarily the best judges of
their own pleasure but may allow preconceptions about
what constitutes poetry "to stand in the way of their
gratification." This being the case, naturally
pleasing poetry, when offered to readers along with
authorial information about proper poetic pleasure, may
force readers "for their own sakes" to embrace
unfamiliar aesthetic pleasures. If Lyrical Ballads,
therefore, was an experiment to see "how far the
language of conversation in the middle and lower
classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic
pleasure," it was an experiment that had already been
tried by the author himself and was now handed over for
54
further guided experimentation in the hearts and minds
of his readers. According to Wordsworth, such
important matters could hardly be left to the
unassisted judgment of an audience that was still in
the thrall of eighteenth-century preconceptions.
Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, Dennis had been able to assert confidently
that there are rules of art that perfectly reflect the
designs of nature and that these rules can be
delineated by a thoughtful, receptive, educated
critic— that is, by Dennis himself. Wordsworth, on the
other hand, had lost faith in rules and had little
respect for critics; thus he invested the authority to
teach the true nature of art in the thoughtful, feeling
poet who had been educated both by literature and by
nature— that is, in Wordsworth himself. He correctly
predicted that some "[r]eaders of superior judgment"
would criticize the poems as too extreme in embracing a
natural style; "It will perhaps appear to them, that
wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the
author has sometimes descended too low, and that many
of his expressions are too familiar, and not of
sufficient dignity." However, he also argued that "the
more conversant the reader is with our elder writers,
and with those in modern times who have been the most
successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer
complaints of this kind will he have to make." In
other words, readers who had already joined Wordsworth
in appreciating the best examples of colloquial,
natural poetry would necessarily be better equipped to
sympathize with his experiment and understand his
purposes. Thus, despite Wordsworth's reliance on a new
literary standard of naturalness, he held that proper
reading demands careful training in responding to the
best available poetry, selected according to his own
standards, so that his readers could successfully enjoy
his works:
An accurate taste in poetry, and in all
the other arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds has
observed, is an acquired talent, which
can only be produced by severe thought,
and a long continued intercourse with
the best models of composition. This is
mentioned not with so ridiculous a
purpose as to prevent the most
inexperienced reader from judging for
himself; but merely to temper the
rashness of decision, and to suggest
that if poetry be a subject on which
much time has not been bestowed, the
judgment may be erroneous, and that in
many cases it necessarily will be so.
(LB 8)
Wordsworth described a literary community in which
both inexperienced readers and those "of superior
judgment" might go astray for lack of familiarity with
"the best models of composition," that is, with poetry
that ranges widely over "every subject which can
interest the human mind" and "contains a natural
delineation of human passions, human characters, and
human incidents.1 1 Readers must join the evidence of
their own humanity with the guidance of the writer— and
not just any writer— to judge accurately what is
interesting and natural. Apparently a reader's own
human endowment is by itself inadequate preparation to
enable him to appreciate genuine poetry, for the
artifices of society pervert his vision of his own
nature. According to Wordsworth, therefore, the
reader's lost natural powers can only be regained
through a sophisticated encounter with the "best
models" under the guidance of the poet. Thus he
described the true poet as a literary redeemer who
could restore his readers' judgment, as long as they
were willing to submit to his direction.
In the advertisement to Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth claimed that true poets have the authority
to guide the literary judgment and pleasure of their
readers. He was obviously rather nervous about
reaction to this volume and included in the
advertisement specific guidelines to reading several of
the poems that followed. Betraying his own lack of
confidence, he assured his audience that they would
clearly discern his authorial intentions in one of the
more unusual pieces in Lyrical Ballads; "The poem of
the Thorn, as the reader will soon discover, is not
57
supposed to be spoken in the author's own person: the
character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently
shew itself in the course of the story." He also
attempted to prepare his audience for the unfamiliar
and antiquated language of Coleridge's "Rime of the
Ancyent Marinere," stating that "with a few exceptions,
the Author believes that the language adopted in it has
been equally intelligible for these three last
centuries" (LB 8).
In the advertisement to Lvrical Ballads lay the
rudiments of a Romantic myth of authorial genius.
Wordsworth gradually created this mythic interpretation
of his own literary work as subsequent editions of
Lvrical Ballads and his poems met with continuing
critical condemnation as well as increasingly vocal
praise. Coleridge, too, eventually had a hand in
describing the genius of the "Giant Wordsworth," for he
proclaimed himself the official critic at the court of
this great literary genius (LSTC 1: 297). But it is
primarily in Wordsworth's critical appendages to his
own work that he came to be cast as the foremost
example of beleaguered Romantic genius. This self
declaration took the form of a mythic narrative telling
the tale of a poet-hero, who first withdraws from
society in order to discover his own native genius,
then uses this genius to create texts that overcome and
58
redeem his readers. As Wordsworth, and later
Coleridge, told this tale of mythic genius, writing is
a solitary act that requires seclusion and a
willingness to ignore the expectations of others. Yet
they also described writing as a potentially powerful
means of engagement with readers, as a way for
enlightened genius to save a literary community from
its own conventional predispositions.
By helping to create this myth of his own genius,
Wordsworth provided himself with the rationale to
dismiss any adverse criticism of his poems as the
tribulation that inevitably follows heroic endeavor.
True, the hearts and minds of discerning readers were
required as laboratories to test his literary
experiments,* however he could accept or reject this
experimental evidence at will, stubbornly insisting
that only those who were willing to submit to his
guidance were qualified to serve as his judges. In
turn, Wordsworth's authorial stubbornness would
infuriate those critics who admitted the power of his
poetry but wished to guide his genius in paths that
they recommended he pursue.
59
The Reception of the First Edition of Lvrical Ballads
The publication of Lvrical Ballads initiated a
literary tug of war between Wordsworth and his critics.
In the year following the first edition, four critical
journals paid the anonymous volume the compliment of
substantial reviews: the Critical Review, the Monthly
Review, the British Critic, and the Analytical Review.
All four journals took the author of the advertisement
at his word and both evaluated the premises of this
poetic experiment and tested its conclusions in the
minds of the reviewers. If the reviewers' results did
not unanimously sustain the author's claims for these
experimental poems, at least, with the help of the
advertisement, Wordsworth was successful in convincing
his critics to take his authorial claims seriously.
The first major review of the volume was written
by Robert Southey and printed anonymously (like most
contemporary reviews) in the October 1798 number of the
Critical Review. Southey spared no words in expressing
his vehement dislike of many of the poems and
opposition to much of the theory contained in this
volume. While willing to endorse Wordsworth's platform
on poetic diction, he strongly disagreed with the
supposition that humble, rustic characters and
incidents made appropriate materials for poetry. "The
60
•experiment,'" he wrote, . . has failed, not because
the language of conversation is little adapted to 'the
purposes of poetic pleasure,1 but because it has been
tried upon uninteresting subjects” (Reiman, pt. A,
1: 310).
The "most important" of these unsuccessful
experimental pieces, according to Southey, was "The
Idiot Boy," which he argued was a prime example of the
wasted genius of the anonymous author of Lvrical
Ballads. whose identity he well knew but protected:
"No tale," he wrote, "less deserved the labour that
appears to have been bestowed upon this. It resembles
a Flemish picture in the worthlessness of its design
and the excellence of its execution." Southey disliked
the rest of the experimental poems even more:
The other ballads of this kind are as
bald in story, and are not so highly
embellished in narration. With that
which is entitled The Thorn, we were
altogether displeased. The
advertisement says, it is not told in
the person of the author, but in that of
some loquacious narrator. The author
should have recollected that he who
personates tiresome loquacity, becomes
tiresome himself. (310)
Clearly, Southey had refused to fulfill Wordsworth's
uneasy prediction in the advertisement that the
distinction between narrator and poet would be clear to
his readers. Neither did this reviewer approve his
brother-in-law Coleridge's major contribution.
Recognizing The Rime of the Ancvent Marinere as "a very
different style of poetry . . . a ballad (says the
advertisement) 'professedly written in imitation of the
style. as well as the spirit of the elder poets,"
Southey nevertheless found the poem a failure according
to the intentions expressed in the advertisement:
We are tolerably conversant with the
early English poets; and can discover no
resemblance whatever, except in
antiquated spelling and a few obsolete
words. This piece appears to us
perfectly original in style as well as
in story. Many of the stanzas are
laboriously beautiful; but in connection
they are absurd or unintelligible. . . .
We do not sufficiently understand the
story to analyse it. It is a Dutch
attempt at German sublimity. (3 08-09)
"Genius," he concluded, "has here been employed in
producing a poem of little merit."
Southey was staking an implicit claim that he as a
critic could more accurately judge Coleridge's genius
than could the author himself. This review, then,
presented a rebuttal to Wordsworth's declaration in the
advertisement that readers must look to the authors of
texts, rather than to their critics, to understand the
true nature of poetry. These poets and their first
reviewer were battling over poetic genius itself, as
they disputed whether these poems constituted a
revolutionary return to the sources of art or a
misapplication of poetic gifts. According to Southey,
both Wordsworth and Coleridge had wasted their
undoubted abilities in creating these poems: "every
piece," he wrote, "discovers genius; and, ill as the
author has frequently employed his talents, they
certainly rank him with the best of living poets"
(310). Southey did express approval of the few
"serious pieces," such as "Tintern Abbey," in which he
considered Wordsworth to have applied his genius
appropriately, speaking in his own voice instead of
with the voices of his rural characters.
Within the literary set that had coalesced around
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey's review was regarded
as an unfair critical assault. Charles Lamb, who had
experienced his own falling-out with Coleridge in 1798,
nevertheless wrote to Southey remonstrating, "If you
wrote that review in the Critical Review. I am sorry
you are so sparing of praise to the Ancient Marinere."
for it "plays more tricks with the mind than the last
poem CTintern Abbey1, which is yet one of the finest
written" (Smith 32). Unlike Southey, Lamb seemed
willing to submit his mind to Coleridge's poetic
"tricks."
Wordsworth apparently did not read Southey's
review until returning to England in the spring of 1799
63
from eight months abroad, for it was only then that he
wrote furiously to his publisher, Joseph Cottle:
. . . Southey's review I have seen.
He knew that I published those poems for
money and money alone. He knew that
money was of importance to me. If he
could not conscientiously have spoken
differently of the volume, he ought to
have declined the task of reviewing it.
The bulk of the poems he has
described as destitute of merit. Am I
recompensed for this by vague praises of
my talents? I care little for the
praise of any other professional critic,
but as it may help me to pudding. (LWDW
1: 268)
Though admitting the professional status of his critic,
Wordsworth made it clear in this spluttering letter
that he did not welcome Southey's evidence that the
poetic experiment of Lvrical Ballads had failed. From
his friends, he seemed to expect an unquestioning
loyalty toward his pursuit of literary success, and he
claimed (at least to his publisher) to view his
relationship with his reading audience as a financial
tie rather than an aesthetic one. Wordsworth wrote
Cottle again in the summer of 1799 insisting that
publication of his poetry was a matter of business
rather than art: "My aversion from publication
increases every day, so much so, that no motives
whatever, nothing but pecuniary necessity, will, I
think, ever prevail upon me to commit myself to the
press again . . ." (LWDW 1: 264).
64
Southey's review generally set the tone for those
that followed, which tended to expend considerable
energy arguing the merits of the advertisement and its
theoretical pronouncements. The Analytical Review of
December, 1798, welcomed the advertisement as
"sensible" and "a very pertinent introduction to the
studied simplicity which pervades many of the poems"
(Reiman, pt. A, 1: 8). The Monthly Review, however,
took issue with the advertisement's theory that poetry
had declined in modern times. This reviewer,
Dr. Burney, argued that the Lvrical Ballads were not
properly poetry at all, since their author had forsaken
poetic effects in a misguided attempt to restore
literature to its pristine early state. As a result,
his verse had descended almost to the level of prose:
When we confess that our author has had
the art of pleasing and interesting in
no common way by his natural
delineations of human passions, human
characters, and human incidents, we must
add that these effects were not produced
by the poetry:— we have been as much
affected by pictures of misery and
unmerited distress, in prose. The
elevation of soul, when it is lifted
into the higher regions of imagination,
affords us a delight of a different kind
from the sensation which is produced by
the detail of common incidents.
(Reiman, pt. A, 2: 713)
Then in October of 1799, a full year after the
publication of Lvrical Ballads, the British Critic ran
65
a positive review of the volume, probably written by
Wordsworth's friend Francis Wrangham, and this reviewer
both thoroughly approved the advertisement and judged
its experimental claims to have been substantiated by
the poems themselves:
The attempt made in this little volume
is one that needs our cordial
approbation; and it is an attempt by no
means unsuccessful. The endeavour of
the author is to recall our poetry from
the fantastical excess of refinement, to
simplicity and nature. The account of
this design, and its probable effects
upon modern readers, is very sensibly
given in the Introduction. (Reiman,
pt. A, 1: 128)
The author of this review was willing to join
Wordsworth in all the theoretical opinions stated in
the advertisement:
We fully agree with the author, that the true
notion of poetry must be sought among the
poets, rather than the critics; and we will
add, that, unless a critic is a poet also, he
will generally make but indifferent work in
judging of the effusions of Genius. (128)
Wordsworth would have been fortunate indeed had all his
critics been this willing to validate his authorial
power.
The results of the literary experiment were rather
mixed, judging from the critical responses both to the
poetic reforms suggested in the advertisement and to
individual poems.1 Yet none of the first critics of
Lvrical Ballads either refused to try these
experimental poems as suggested by Wordsworth or
conceded to him complete authority to command their
interpretations of poems and force upon his readers
whatever literary reforms he believed were necessary.
The terms of such a reformation, these reviewers
implied, would need to be negotiated in a series of
theoretical exchanges between poets and critics.
Wordsworth could offer an experiment to the British
literary community; but the critical guardians of that
community continued to insist on the validity of their
own experimental judgments of his poems.
One of these reviewers, Dr. Burney, expressed his
own fear that Wordsworth's ideal of isolated genius had
removed the poet from the social network necessary to
support both life and literary creation. Like Southey,
Burney singled out "Tintern Abbey" for particular
praise, judging the poem to be the "reflections of no
common mind; poetical, beautiful, and philosophical."
He also, however, expressed his opinion that this poem
is "somewhat tinctured with gloomy, narrow, and
unsociable ideas of seclusion from the commerce of the
world: as if men were born to live in woods and wilds,
unconnected with each other" (Reiman, pt. A, 2: 717).
With an eye to rectifying this unseemly poetic
isolation, Dr. Burney offered the anonymous poet of
Lyrical Ballads some critical advice: "So much genius
and originality are discovered in this publication," he
counseled, "that we wish to see another from the same
hand, written on more elevated subjects and in a more
cheerful disposition" (717).
The Second Edition and Preface
The advertisement to the first edition of Lvrical
Ballads advanced Wordsworth's claim to be a reformer of
English poetry. In the letters of 1799-1800 and in his
plans for a second edition, however, he revealed his
awareness that success would come only to those who
were willing to attend to their readers' tastes. The
first edition had been a modest critical and financial
success, and Wordsworth wrote to Cottle in the spring
of 1799, asking him for an exact accounting of the
sales of Lvrical Ballads:
You tell me the poems have not sold
ill. If it is possible, I should wish
to know what number have been sold.
From what I can gather it seems
that the Ancient mariner has, on the
whole, been an injury to the volume. I
mean that the old words and the
strangeness of it have deterred readers
from going on. If the volume should
come to a second edition, I would put in
its place some little things which would
be more likely to suit the common taste.
(LWDW 1: 264)
68
Wordsworth informed Cottle that "pecuniary
necessity" would now be his sole reason for
publication, and he seems to have decided that
henceforward he would carefully monitor his
publications as business investments as well as
aesthetic documents. Lvrical Ballads was now
completely under Wordsworth's authorial control, and he
elected to reprint and enlarge Lvrical Ballads under
his own name as two volumes, volume one a revised
second edition of the 1798 volume and volume two a book
of new poems. Coleridge deferred his own work to help
with the revisions, including those on his "Ancyent
Marinere," which Wordsworth had decided to include
after all. The grueling process of revision and new
composition continued through much of 1799 and nearly
all of 1800, as Wordsworth and his circle of faithful
supporters labored to create a second edition that
would be "more likely to suit the common taste" and yet
also remain true to his aesthetic principles. In
September of 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to
Mrs. John Marshall expressing her hope that the result
of these joint literary efforts would be an increasing
audience for her brother's poems:
The first volume sold much better than
we expected, and was liked by a much
greater number of people, not that we
had ever much doubt of its finally
making its way, but we knew that poems
69
so different from what have in general
become popular immediately after their
publication were not like to be admired
all at once. The first volume I have no
doubt had prepared a number of
purchasers for the second, and
independent of that, I think the second
is much more likely to please the
generality of readers. (LWDW 1: 297-98)
The advertisement to the 1798 edition of Lyrical
Ballads sketched briefly Wordsworth's claim of
authorial power. Over the next seventeen years, he
expanded this claim into a full-blown genius myth,
surrounding new editions of his works with increasingly
explicit justifications of his own poetic heroism. In
the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, he replaced the
brief advertisement with a much longer preface, which
he revised and enlarged for the 1802 edition. In these
two versions of the famous preface to Lvrical Ballads,
and later in the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface"
printed in 1815, Wordsworth made ever stronger claims
for his poetic authority over his readers and critics,
as well as the redemptive potential of his genius to
rehabilitate the corrupted minds and hearts of modern
men and women. He began the 1800 preface, however, by
admitting his failure to meet his readers' conventional
expectations:
It is supposed, that by the act of
writing in verse an Author makes a
formal engagement that he will gratify
certain known habits of association,
70
that he not only thus apprizes the
Reader that certain classes of ideas and
expressions will be found in his book,
but that others will be carefully
excluded. .. . I will not take upon me
to determine the exact import of the
promise which by the act of writing in
verse an Author in the present day makes
to his Reader; but I am certain it will
appear to many persons that I have not
fulfilled the terms of an engagement
thus voluntarily contracted. (LB 237)
Wordsworth suggested that, though he had failed to
satisfy the terms of this unspecified conventional
contract, his preface could offer readers a new
literary agreement, clarifying the unusual nature of
his poetry and justifying its unexpected forms and
subjects on the basis of a new aesthetic theory. He
explained that his primary goal in writing Lvrical
Ballads (with ’ ’ the assistance," he noted, "of a
friend") had been to explore the basic psychology of
the human mind as it functions in ordinary events:
The principal object . . . which I
proposed to myself in these Poems was to
make the incidents of common life
interesting by tracing in them, truly
though not ostentatiously, the primary
laws of our nature: chiefly as far as
regards the manner in which we associate
ideas in a state of excitement.
(236, 238)
In the 1802 preface Wordsworth added that he had meant
to present these ordinary incidents "throughout, as far
as was possible, in a selection of language really used
71
by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a
certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary
things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
way1 1 (2 38-39). When all worked well, the reader should
find that the poet's imaginative yet natural style was
intriguing. Indeed, Wordsworth's preface was an
extended attempt to persuade readers that they would
like his poems as soon as they learned to accept his
guidance on the true nature of poetry.
In the preface, Wordsworth justified his authority
by enlarging on the theoretical ideal of primitive
genius that he had merely suggested in the
advertisement. He explained to his readers that he had
selected "low and rustic life" for his materials, in
search of the anachronistic primitivism of lives lived
close to nature;
Low and rustic life was generally chosen
because in that situation the essential
passions of the heart find a better soil
in which they can attain their maturity,
are less under restraint, and speak a
plainer and more emphatic language;
because in that situation our elementary
feelings exist in a state of greater
simplicity and consequently may be more
accurately contemplated and more
forcibly communicated; because the
manners of rural life germinate from
those elementary feelings; and from the
necessary character of rural occupations
are more easily comprehended; and are
more durable; and lastly, because in
that situation the passions of men are
incorporated with the beautiful and
permanent forms of nature. (239)
72
Wordsworth argued that, in writing about rural
subjects, he was engaged in a study of natural living.
He declared that a careful selection of rural language
that had been "Purified . . . from what appear to be
its real defects" would offer a deep resource of poetic
power. For Wordsworth believed that the middle and
upper echelons of the British rural population— the
north country small holders, customary tenants, and
"statesmen" like Michael— unconsciously used a "more
permanent and a far more philosophical language than
that which is frequently substituted for it by
Poets. ..." By purifying this philosophical language
and using it in his poems, he hoped to escape the empty
artifices of his contemporaries and rejoin his creative
genius to nature.
Wordsworth did make a deliberate distinction
between his own return to natural language in Lyrical
Ballads and popular magazine verse on sentimental
rustic subjects. True, these sentimental poets, like
Wordsworth, refused to satisfy the conventional
expectation that poetry should use solemn diction to
write about elevated subjects. But, according to
Wordsworth, these poems were also marked, as his were
not, by "triviality and meanness both of thought and
language" (240). Such popular poems were trivial, he
asserted, because their writers had failed to establish
73
their own poetic authority. Wordsworth, on the other
hand, claimed that his devotion to serious
contemplation of ordinary rural subjects allowed him to
infuse his texts with power: "I believe," he wrote,
"that my habits of meditation have so formed my
feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as
strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry
along with them a purpose." He had, then, what
sentimentally trivial versifiers did not: the "right
to the name of a Poet," not only because of his innate
mental abilities, but also because he had carefully
prepared for his vocation:
For all good poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings; but
though this be true, Poems to which any
value can be attached, were never
produced on any variety of subjects but
by a man who being possessed of more
than usual organic sensibility had also
thought long and deeply. (240)
Wordsworth asserted that true poets can use their
works as vehicles to share their own enlightened mental
processes with the reading public. A poet who has
applied his own genius to discerning the remnants of
natural language preserved in rural speech is thereby
qualified to teach readers to uncover the delicate,
natural thoughts and feelings that lay hidden in their
own minds beneath the trappings of modern society.
Wordsworth urged his readers to interpret his lyrical
74
ballads as psychological demonstrations, intended "to
illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas
are associated in a state of excitement" and "to follow
the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by
the great and simple affections of our nature." He
submitted that, by writing such psychological poems, he
was offering his contemporaries the benefit of his own
elevated mind:
. . . the human mind is capable of
excitement without the application of
gross and violent stimulants; and he
must have a very faint perception of its
beauty and dignity who does not know
this, and who does not further know that
one being is elevated above another in
proportion as he possesses this
capability. It has therefore appeared
to me that to endeavour to produce or
enlarge this capability is one of the
best services in which at any period, a
Writer can be engaged. . . . (242-43)
By construing his literary work as humanitarian
service, Wordsworth could argue that readers who
disliked his poems were merely demonstrating the
unnatural state of their own minds and their profound
need for his help. Such help, he informed them, was
particularly needed in his own day: "For a multitude
of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a
combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of
the mind, and ... to reduce it to a state of almost
savage torpor." Wordsworth envisioned his urban
readers as intellectually and emotionally diminished,
bored by "the uniformity of their occupations" and
experiencing "a craving for extraordinary incident."
According to Wordsworth existing literary forms were
unfortunately reinforcing rather than alleviating these
trends. Thus the changing economic and social world
had generated a popular literature that existed solely
to satisfy the "degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation" demanded by the modern city-dweller
(242-43).
Wordsworth saw his own work as a call to readers
to rediscover their native powers and extricate
themselves, with his help, from the morass of their
degraded thoughts and feelings. He declared himself
not only the redeemer of his readers, but the best
judge of his own poetic creations, though he predicted
that some of his expressions, meant as "tender and
pathetic," would seem "ludicrous" to them:
Such faulty expressions, were I
convinced they were faulty at present,
and that they must necessarily continue
to be so, I would willingly take all
reasonable pains to correct. But it is
dangerous to make these alterations on
the simple authority of a few
individuals, or even of certain classes
of men; for where the understanding of
an Author is not convinced, or his
feelings altered, this cannot be done
without great injury to himself: for
his own feelings are his stay and
support, and if he sets them aside in
one instance, he may be induced to
76
repeat this act till his mind loses all
confidence in itself and becomes utterly
debilitated. (262)
Wordsworth was developing a mythic narrative about
his own poetic genius. According to this myth, authors
like Wordsworth who write original works in times of
social degeneration cannot afford to heed the negative
reactions of their readers. Instead, the redemptive
poet's own trained judgment must serve as the best
indication of the worth of his texts. Indeed,
Wordsworth suggested that, though original authors
ought to ignore their readers' reactions, they need not
fear being trapped inside an idiosyncratic inner world,
for the act of composition itself forces true poets to
transcend their own immediate experience. For, to
Wordsworth, poetry is no simple disgorging of the
poet’s natural feeling. True, it begins as "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; however,
those feelings are then to be "recollected in
tranquillity," initiating a reflective distancing of
the poet from his own initial response: "the emotion
is contemplated till by a species of reaction the
tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
similar to that which was before the subject of
contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself
actually exist in the mind." The re-created emotion
accompanying composition must then be aesthetically
77
manipulated by the poet so that, in addition to the
emotion with which he began, "the mind will upon the
whole be in a state of enjoyment" (260). Moreover,
according to Wordsworth, poets can only use their own
reactions to test such enjoyment. Therefore, any poet
who focuses outward on his readers will find himself
writing what shallow minds wish to read instead of
achieving a state of aesthetic transcendence.
In the 1802 preface Wordsworth added a lengthy
section defining the nature, activity, and worth of the
poet, reinforcing his claim that poets can save readers
from the sins of their generation. "What is a Poet?"
he asked:
He is a man speaking to men: a man, it
is true, endued with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm and
tenderness, who has a greater knowledge
of human nature, and a more
comprehensive soul, than are supposed to
be common among mankind; a man pleased
with his own passions and volitions, and
who rejoices more than other men in the
spirit of life that is in him;
delighting to contemplate similar
volitions and passions as manifested in
the goings-on of the Universe, and
habitually impelled to create them where
he does not find them. (249-50)
Wordsworth described this idealized figure as having a
godlike ability to create an independent internal
world. Thus the poet can "conjur[e] up in himself
passions" that "more nearly resemble the passions
78
produced by real events, than anything which, from the
motions of their own minds merely, other men are
accustomed to feel in themselves" (250). True, even
the poet's powerful inner life cannot pretend to match
the reality of emotions prompted by events; but he can
attempt to re-create real life within his own head:
. . . it will be the wish of the Poet to
bring his feelings near to those of the
persons whose feelings he describes,
nay, for short spaces of time perhaps,
to let himself slip into an entire
delusion, and even confound and identify
his own feelings with theirs; modifying
only the language which is thus
suggested, by a consideration that he
describes for a particular purpose, that
of giving pleasure. (250)
That is, through entering his own aesthetic world,
the poet can achieve a kind of temporary self-
obi iteration. He focuses intently on his primary human
subject— that is, himself— rather than on the artistic
preconceptions of his readers; yet the resulting texts
address the reader with an indirect and selfless voice,
acting on them to produce an emotional state similar to
the poet's own re-created emotion. Like Shaftesbury,
Wordsworth held that poets who begin by withdrawing
inside themselves will end by creating timeless works
in which the self is paradoxically absent.
Wordsworth argued that the poet of genius can
subdue and redeem an audience by steadfastly keeping
79
his eye on his own created world. For Wordsworth saw
the poet— indeed, saw himself— as "the rock of defence
of human nature," who "binds together by passion and
knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is
spread over the whole earth, and over all time" (253).
By making these imperial claims explicit in the
prefaces of 1800 and 1802, Wordsworth risked the
mockery of critics who refused to grant him such
extensive powers. Yet it was a gamble that would
ultimately succeed, not only because his poems won him
an increasingly loyal audience among British readers,
but also because his declaration of authority took a
rhetorically effective mythic form. In place of cold
theoretical reasoning or accounts of the tawdry
financial aspects of publication, he offered his
readers an appealing portrait of his own poetic heroism
and abiding self-confidence despite an uncertain
aesthetic era. Eventually Wordsworth's mythologizing
of his own genius would leave the most enduring picture
of his work. Nevertheless, many contemporary critics
and readers met the published versions of his genius
myth with resistance to the sweeping scope of his
authorial claims.
80
Reactions to the Preface
In the prefaces of 1800 and 1802, Wordsworth
claimed that his poetry was a natural remedy for the
ills of his generation, which was sunk in "savage
torpor" and habituated to the literary stimulant of
artifice and sensational effect. Yet not all his
contemporaries were enthusiastic about accepting either
his diagnosis of their maladies or the course of
treatment he prescribed. As Klancher notes, "it is no
wonder that middle-class readers and reviewers of 18 00
resented having what seemed to them freely chosen
preferences painted as a narcotic reflex" (13 7).
Wordsworth and his middle-class readers and
critics were struggling to define the range of
authorial power, as well as the limitations on that
power imposed by critical standards or by a reader's
own authentic reactions to a work of art. Most review
journals reacted to the 1800 preface by their own
silent refusal to review the second edition of Lyrical
Ballads (Smith 61). The only full review of the second
edition that would appear in a major review journal ran
in the February, 1801, issue of the British Critic, and
this reviewer (possibly again Francis Wrangham)
presented a mild argument in favor of submission to
Wordsworth's claim of power. This reviewer did praise
81
the preface as a "necessary justification" and
described it as containing "much penetrating judicious
observation," despite being somewhat flawed by
"metaphysical obscurity." And he agreed with
Wordsworth that the humble subject matter of these
poems, which might at first jolt the reader in its
unexpected commonness, would became more pleasing with
time: "As to the subjects, it must be owned that their
worth does not always appear at first sight; but,
judging from our own feelings, we must assert, that it
generally grows upon the reader by subsequent perusal"
(Reiman, pt. A, 1: 131, 132).
While this reviewer seemed unwilling to cede to
Wordsworth complete authority over poetic standards, he
agreed that through their works poets can function as
public leaders:
. . . that man may be considered as a
public benefactor, who, with talents
equal to the task, which is arduous,
recalls attention to the more natural
style, and shows what may be effected by
simple language, expressive of human
passions, and genuine, not artificial
feelings. In this character, Mr.
Wordsworth appears, and appears with
success, to which we could by no means
refuse our approbation.
Yet the critic admitted that "sometimes [the poet] goes
so far in his pursuit of simplicity, as to become flat
or weak." Overall, however, he judged that "in
82
general, he sets an example which the full dressed poet
of affectation might wish, but wish in vain, to follow
(134) .
In contrast to this gently approving assessment of
the 1800 preface, Francis Jeffrey was infuriated by the
1802 version, and he launched the first number of the
Edinburgh Review with an oblique attack on Wordsworth
that was hidden in a review of Southey's Thalaba.
Without actually naming either Wordsworth or Lyrical
Ballads, Jeffrey linked Wordsworth and Southey in a
group he christened the "Lake Poets," who were, he
argued, renegades from the proper boundaries of art:
The disciples of this school boast much
of its originality, and seem to value
themselves very highly for having broken
loose from the bondage of ancient
authority, and re-asserted the
independence of genius. Originality,
however, we are persuaded is rarer than
mere alteration; and a man may change a
good master for a bad one, without
finding himself at all nearer to
independence. (Reiman, pt. A, 2: 416)
Jeffrey denounced the Lake Poets' "formidable
conspiracy . . . against sound judgment in matters
poetical," and he described Wordsworth's preface as an
act of war, "a kind of manifesto" and Lyrical Ballads
as "one of their most flagrant acts of hostility"
(416) .2
83
This astute critical defender of neoclassical
principles clearly pinpointed the oxymoronic weakness
of Wordsworth's theory of "natural art": if poets
revert to common language in describing common
situations and characters, it is unclear whether enough
artistry remains to distinguish their texts from the
prosaic language of everyday life. In the 1802 preface
Wordsworth argued that the process of composition,
including the reworking of poetic materials in the
poet's mind and his careful selection and purification
of the language of his poems, would adequately separate
"natural" poems from ordinary language that had not
been filtered through the mind of an artist. Jeffrey,
however, insisted that Wordsworth and Southey had
filtered out the most artistic elements from their
poems, so that the Lake Poet's brand of "simplicity
does not consist, by any means, in the rejection of
glaring or superfluous ornament,— in the substitution
of elegance to splendour [sic],— or in that refinement
of art which seeks concealment in its own perfection,"
but instead "consists . . . in a very great degree, in
the positive and bona fide rejection of art
altogether . . ." (419).
In addition to the responses of two reviewers,
Wordsworth also met the reactions of his own literary
set and the growing number of literary young men who
considered themselves Wordsworth enthusiasts. From the
evidence of his correspondence of 1801-1802, Wordsworth
found it painful in the extreme to receive criticism
from readers of his poetry, even when any adverse
criticism was joined with a reader's overall enthusiasm
about Wordsworth's poems. He sent a copy of the second
volume to Charles Lamb, who had already borrowed and
read it; Lamb wrote back, offering the poet his
generally positive commentary on the new poems in
Volume 2, while concluding that he did "not feel any
one poem in it so forcibly as the Ancient marinere. and
the Mad Mother, and the Lines at Tintern Abbey in the
first" (Smith 44). Wordsworth's reply to Lamb's
criticism has been lost, but Lamb reported on the
poet's response in a letter to Thomas Manning,
conveying the irritability that prompted Wordsworth to
answer Lamb "almost instantaneously in a long letter of
four sweating pages":
. . . he was sorry his 2d vol. had not
given me more pleasure (Devil a hint did
I give that it had not pleased me), and
'was compelled to wish that my range of
sensibility was more extended, being
obliged to believe that I should receive
large influxes of happiness and happy
Thoughts' (I suppose from the L.B.).
(LWDW 1: 316)
Faced with Lamb's mixed response to his new poems and
preference for the first volume, Wordsworth merely
85
blamed his friend's limited "range of sensibility,"
instead of admitting that some of Lamb's criticism
might have been justified. Such obstinacy tended to
enrage even Wordsworth's greatest supporters, for,
taken to its logical extreme, his claim to be the
healer of the public could be used to attack all
criticism— even that offered by his friends— as due to
the "savage torpor" of their own sick minds.3
As a second instance of brewing insurrection from
the ranks of Wordsworth's followers, Sara Hutchinson
revealed her impatience in the spring of 18 02 with the
character of the old leech-gatherer in "Resolution and
Independence." Wordsworth wrote back immediately,
criticizing his future sister-in-law for her inability
to emulate his own sympathy for this character: "You
speak of his speech as tedious— everything is tedious
when one does not read with the feelings of the
Author— 'The Thorn' is tedious to hundreds; and so is
the Idiot Bov to hundreds." Then Dorothy joined in to
remonstrate with "Dear Sara"—
When you happen to be displeased with
what you suppose to be the tendency or
moral of any poem which William writes,
ask yourself whether you have hit upon
the real tendency and true moral, and
above all never think that he writes for
no reason but merely because a thing
happened— and when you feel any poem of
his to be tedious, ask yourself in what
spirit it was written— whether merely to
tell the tale and be through with it, or
86
to illustrate a particular character or
truth etc etc. (LWDW 2: 3 66)
Finally, in May of 1802 the seventeen-year-old
John Wilson sent Wordsworth an enthusiastic letter,
informing Wordsworth of his "love and admiration" for
the poet and his work. This young student, later a
powerful force in British criticism, praised his idol
by echoing the very terms used in the preface:
That your poetry is the language of
Nature, in my opinion, admits of no
doubt. Both the thoughts and
expressions may be tried by that
standard. You have seized upon those
feelings that most deeply interest the
heart, and that also come within the
sphere of common observation. You do
not write merely for the pleasure of
philosophers and men of improved taste,
but for all who think, for all who feel.
(Smith 54)
This much, Wordsworth was undoubtedly willing to
endure, but he could not accept the criticism that
followed. Taking Wordsworth's own standard of
aesthetic pleasure as a guide, Wilson offered the
results of his own internal experiment with "The Idiot
Boy," which he judged a complete failure, for it did
not please him in the least. "You never deviate from
Nature," he assured Wordsworth; "in you that would be
impossible; but in this case you have delineated
feelings which, though natural, do not please, but
which create a certain degree of disgust or contempt."
87
Wilson informed the poet that he should redirect his
genius toward more pleasing projects: "In reading the
Idiot Bov, all persons who allow themselves to think,
must admire your talents," he earnestly asserted, "but
they regret that they have been so employed, and while
they esteem the author, they cannot help being
displeased with his performance."
Wordsworth wasted no time in replying to his young
reader. He accepted Wilson's expressions of joy in
Wordsworth's poems "as an earnest that others might be
delighted with them in the same or a like manner" (LWDW
1: 353). However, Wordsworth adamantly refused to
accept Wilson's evidence that "The Idiot Boy" had
failed as an instrument of aesthetic pleasure.
Wordsworth instructed Wilson that the reactions of
readers are simply too unstable and divided for the
poet to have faith in them: "You begin what you say
upon the Idiot Boy with this observation, that nothing
is a fit subject for poetry which does not please. But
here follows a question. Does not please whom?" The
only answer Wordsworth could offer was that poetry
should please "human nature, as it has been [and eve]r
will be." And where might the poet find a reliable
test of human nature? Only in his own soul, for it is
"by stripping our own hearts naked, and by looking out
of ourselves to[wards me]n who lead the simplest lives
most according to nature . . . " that men may rid
themselves of the privileged illusion "that human
nature and the persons they associate with are one and
the same thing." Anyone who had failed to meet
Wordsworth's standards was in need of the poet1s
instruction in human sympathy:
A man must have done this habitually
before his judgment upon the Idiot Boy
would be in any way decisive with me. I
know I have done this myself habitually;
I wrote the poem with exceeding delight
and pleasure, and whenever I read it I
read it with pleasure. You have given
me praise for having reflected
faithfully in my poems the feelings of
human nature I would fain hope that I
have done so. But a great Poet ought to
do more than this he ought to a certain
degree to rectify men's feeling, to give
them new compositions of feeling, to
render their feelings more sane pure and
permanent, in short, more consonant to
nature, that is, to eternal nature, and
the great moving spirit of things.
(LWDW 1: 354-55)
At any rate, the fact that some readers had
succeeded in appreciating "The Idiot Boy" was adequate
evidence to Wordsworth "that the feelings there
delineated [are] such as all men may sympathize with."
Since Wordsworth considered himself a leader of men,
rather than a follower, the merest possibility that
readers could be taught to read a poem about a mother
and her idiot son with sympathy and pleasure was
89
adequate reason to place such a tale before them. For,
as he solemnly assured his young reader,
[It] is not enough for me as a poet, to
delineate merely such feelings as all
men do sympathize with but, it is also
highly desirable to add it these others,
such as there is reason to believe they
would be better and more moral beings if
they did sympathize with. (LWDW 1: 358)
Clearly, Wordsworth had no intention of
surrendering his poems to his readers for experimental
assessment. He had submitted himself to his own
program of rigorous preparation for entering the
vocation of poetry, and he insisted that those who
failed to meet his standards of preparation could offer
him no valid criticism of his work. Faced with
criticism, even in its mildest forms, Wordsworth only
strengthened his claims of authorial power.4
The Essay, Supplementary to the Preface of 1815
In the 1815 edition of his poems, Wordsworth added
an "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," which
presented his strongest case for authorial power in the
form of a fully developed myth of poetic genius. This
essay told the story of heroic genius making its way in
a world composed of many enemies and few friends, where
90
the genius offers a doomed society its only possibility
of salvation. That society must heed the call of the
poet-genius; however, the genius quite properly may
choose to ignore the criticism that inevitably comes
his way from that society. This is a story, then, of
literature as a means of redemption, rather than as a
two-way transaction in which the author might learn
from readers, as they learn from him. Instead, the
poet as genius stands alone in the Wordsworthian myth,
stolidly intent on convincing others and refusing to be
dissuaded from his true genius and mission.
In the "Essay Supplementary" Wordsworth indicted
the majority of readers and critics as incapable of
judging poetry because they lack either a genuine love
of poetry or the carefully accumulated knowledge that
could enable them to react wisely to the works they
read. Only a few readers combine both these
qualifications and, "having been enamoured of this art
in their youth, have found leisure, after youth was
spent, to cultivate general literature; in which poetry
has continued to be comprehended as a study" (LB 4 09).
This small class of readers provides the few critics
qualified to offer judgments "of absolute value, and
worthy to be depended upon, as prophetic of the destiny
of a new work" (410). And, it seems, the best evidence
that they understand the laws of poetry is that they
agree with Wordsworth.
Unfortunately, the poet argued, there is more room
for egregious error in criticism than for "opinions
. . . of absolute value." Some critics are "censors,"
judging harshly what they only partly comprehend;
others are "too petulant to be passive to a genuine
poet, and too feeble to grapple with him" (413).
Moreover, since there is so much room for critics to go
awry, "it ought to follow that partial notice only, or
neglect, perhaps long continued, or attention wholly
inadequate to their merits— must have been the fate of
most works in the higher departments of poetry"
(413-14). Therefore, authors must console themselves
when their cherished works encounter adverse
criticism—
by perceiving that there are select
Spirits for whom it is ordained that
their fame shall be in the world an
existence like that of Virtue, which
owes its being to the struggles it
makes, and its vigour to the enemies
whom it provokes;— a vivacious quality,
ever doomed to meet with opposition, and
still triumphing over it; and, from the
nature of its dominion, incapable of
being brought to the sad conclusion of
Alexander, when he wept that there were
no more worlds for him to conquer.
(414)
Wordsworth pointed out the importance of his own
Lyrical Ballads, remarking on the "taste that prevailed
when some of these poems were first published,
seventeen years ago"; "the measure to which "the poetry
of this Island has since that period been coloured by
them"; and the "unremitting hostility with which, upon
some principle or other, they have each and all been
opposed" (426). And he argued that his originality and
the opposition that he had encountered were merely
evidence of his own genius:
The love, the admiration, the
indifference, the slight, the aversion,
and even the contempt, with which these
Poems have been received, knowing, as I
do, the source within my own mind, from
which they have proceeded, and the
labour and pains, which, when labour and
pains appeared needful, have been
bestowed upon them, must all, if I think
consistently, be received as pledges and
tokens, bearing the same general
impression, though widely different in
value;— they are all proofs that for the
present time I have not laboured in
vain; and afford assurances, more or
less authentic, that the products of my
industry will endure. (426)
According to Wordsworth, "every author, as far as
he is great and at the same time original. has had the
task of creating the taste by which he is to be
enjoyed," just as he had in Lyrical Ballads helped his
readers acquire the standards they could use to
appreciate his poems (426). True, he admitted, no
genius stands completely alone, since "[t]he
predecessors of an original Genius of a high order will
93
have smoothed the way for all that he has in common
with them." Nevertheless, in all the truly original
work of a genius, "for what is peculiarly his own, he
will be called upon to clear and often to shape his own
road:— he will be in the condition of Hannibal among
the Alps." Solitude, therefore, should not daunt the
writer, who may take absence of support as proof that
his contemporaries are unable to understand his genius.
Wordsworth had come far from the early eighteenth-
century perspective of Dennis, who argued for the
universal applicability of rules as articulated by the
knowledgeable critic. The new Romantic myth of genius
would justify the egotism of authors on the theory that
poets risk being untrue to their own vision whenever
they pay heed to others1 reactions to their works.
Dennis claimed that literature is a social transaction
that invokes standards binding on both writer and
reader, either of whom may call for enforcement of
those standards if necessary. In contrast, Wordsworth
had come to espouse the view that he alone, and others
who agreed with him, were qualified to measure the
worth of his works against the true standards of
poetry, which were written in the poet's own heart.
According to the Romantic myth of genius, the new
poetic standard would be the poet-genius himself.
94
The problem with this view, as Wordsworth could
not help but be aware, was that, all too often, readers
stubbornly refuse to follow a great man's lead. For
example, they may fail to find pleasure in that which
he has assured them it is their nature to prefer. He
asked his readers to consider the following questions:
where lies the real difficulty of
creating that taste by which a truly
original poet is to be relished? Is it
in breaking the bonds of custom, in
overcoming the prejudices of false
refinement, and displacing the aversions
of inexperience? Or . . . does it
consist in divesting the reader of the
pride that induces him to dwell upon
those points wherein men differ from
each other, to the exclusion of those in
which all men are alike, or the
same . . . ? Finally does it lie in
establishing that dominion over the
spirits of readers by which they are to
be humbled and humanised, in order that
they may be purified and exalted? (426)
Wordsworth's answer to these questions was no, for
he argued that the most persistent difficulty met by
genius is that poetry requires the cooperation of an
audience, or "the exertion of a co-operating power in
the mind of the Reader" if there is to be "elevated or
profound passion" in literature (427). Of all writers,
therefore, the genius may ironically seem the least
successful, for his originality may strike his readers
as mere peculiarity, as deviation from the standards to
which they are accustomed. It follows that the genius
95
must not only exercise his superior originality in
lonely stubbornness; he must also reach within his
audience to stir in them the power to respond to his
original texts:
If every great poet with whose writing
men are familiar, in the highest
exercise of his genius, before he can be
thoroughly enjoyed, has to call forth
and to communicate power. this service,
in a still greater degree, falls upon an
original writer, at his first appearance
in the world.—
For the original writer must actually change the minds
and hearts of men:
Of genius the only proof is, the act of
doing well what is worthy to be done,
and what was never done before: Of
genius, in the fine arts, the only
infallible sign is the widening the
sphere of human sensibility, for the
delight, honour, and benefit of human
nature. Genius is the introduction of a
new element into the intellectual
universe: or, if that be not allowed,
it is the application of powers to
objects on which they had not before
been exercised, or the employment of
them in such a manner as to produce
effects hitherto unknown. (427)
Such acts of originality may require the genius to
do battle with his readers' minds and hearts, trying to
wrench from them a willingness to submit to his poetic
teachings. Yet all the resources at the poet's
disposal— his genius, originality, imagination, natural
language, human sympathy, thoughtful habits— can never
finally succeed in subduing readers who continue to
exert all their own obstinacy in resisting him. He
must call forth his readers' own power, but always at
the risk that they will use their newfound power to
challenge him. Thus this essay was Wordsworth's plea
that readers would accept his help in the heroic
conquest of their fallen selves:
What is all this but an advance, or a
conquest, made by the soul of the poet?
Is it to be supposed that the reader can
make progress of this kind, like an
Indian prince or general— stretched on
his palanquin, and borne by his slaves?
No? he is invigorated and inspirited by
his leader, in order that he may exert
himself; for he cannot proceed in
quiescence, he cannot be carried like a
dead weight. Therefore to create taste
is to call forth and bestow power, of
which knowledge is the effect. (428)
In Wordsworth's view, the "true difficulty" of
original art is overcoming the reluctance of readers to
cooperate with the poet. To help readers cooperate in
their salvation, Wordsworth gave them an advertisement,
two versions of a preface, and an essay on genius.
Moreover, the 1815 edition of his poems presented
Wordsworth's reorganized presentation of himself, his
definition of his own genius. He framed his poems and
provided a textual structure to teach readers how to
transform themselves through his words. He hoped to
97
induce them to combine submission with an active
willingness to follow his lead.
Coleridge's Theory of Genius in Bioaraphia Literaria
This chapter has demonstrated the growth of the
Romantic myth of genius in Wordsworth's extra-textual
arguments, from the rudimentary claims of authorial
power in the advertisement, through the stronger claims
made in two versions of the preface, to the fully
developed myth recounted in the "Essay, Supplementary
to the Preface." Wordsworth met continuing criticism
by expanding his own theory of the imperial power of
the poet, calling for readers to lay down their
defenses and join themselves to his superior genius.
His genius myth, therefore, amounted to a self-
coronation, a new narrative assertion of his authorial
claims.
Coleridge, however, was far from following in all
the "Giant Wordsworth's" theoretical footsteps, and
when the third edition of Lyrical Ballads was published
with its expanded preface, he planned to set straight
the differences between Wordsworth's critical theory
and his own. For, despite Wordsworth's increasing
authorial claims, Coleridge continued to assert the
98
right to criticize the genius of his former
collaborator. He reported to Southey as early as 1802
that he was "startled" by some of his friend's recent
poems, which were "very excellent compositions" but
contained "a daring humbleness of language and
versification, and a strict adherence to matter of
fact, even to prolixity" that Coleridge could not
endorse:
Although Wordsworth's Preface is half a
child of my own brain, and arose out of
conversations so frequent that, with few
exceptions, we could scarcely either of
us, perhaps positively say which first
started a particular thought (I am
speaking of the Preface as it stood in
the second volume), yet I am far from
going all lengths with Wordsworth. . . .
I rather suspect that somewhere or other
there is a radical difference in our
theoretical opinions respecting poetry;
this I shall endeavour to go to the
bottom of, and, acting the arbitrator
between the old school and the new
school, hope to lay down some plain and
conspicuous, though not superficial,
canons of criticism respecting poetry.
(Smith 61-62)
This project, like many of Coleridge's works, was
years in the making. It was not until after Wordsworth
published The Excursion in 1814 and the "Essay
Supplementary" in the 1815 edition of his poems that
Coleridge was finally moved to clarify his theoretical
differences with Wordsworth. Coleridge not only
disagreed with his former friend's growing body of
99
poetic theory; he was also deeply disappointed in The
Excursion. the first published installment of the grand
philosophical project he had convinced Wordsworth to
attempt. He resolved, therefore, to publish both his
own poetic theory and his critical interpretation of
Wordsworth's genius. The result was Bioaraohia
Literaria.
The Biograohia contained Coleridge's own version
of the genius myth, which described true genius as an
inward-looking power rather than as a means of social
redemption. Ironically, however, he produced this
study of poetic originality during a period of extreme
personal and professional duress, and in order to fill
the volumes expected by his publisher, he inserted in
his argument large, unattributed paraphrases of German
aesthetic theory.5 That is, just as Wordsworth
admitted to pecuniary motives in his letters, while
describing genius in the preface as a mission of
redemption, Coleridge plagiarized the words and ideas
of others when he was under intense pressure to publish
an argument that original genius should ignore external
constraints. At any rate, in the Biooraphia. Coleridge
described three kinds of mental abilities: first,
"mere talent (or the faculty of appropriating and
applying the knowledge of others)"? second, "the
creative, and self-sufficing power of absolute Genius";
100
and third, between the two extremes, the category of
“commanding genius," or an outward-looking creativity
that is closely bound to the practical world (1: 31).
The highest form of creativity, absolute genius,
is given to those who neither borrow from others nor
care much about practical affairs. In Coleridge's
words, absolute geniuses "rest content between thought
and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which
their own living spirit supplies the substance. and
their imagination the ever-varying form"; commanding
geniuses, on the other hand, feel impelled to "impress
their preconceptions on the world without, in order to
present them back to their own view with the satisfying
degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality"
(1: 32). To Coleridge, then, aiming the work of genius
outward was evidence of an inability to rest content
with ideas instead of seeing those ideas played out in
the real world. His theory did not provide for the
possibility that commanding geniuses may wish to make
an impression on the world because they believe the
world needs their impression, rather than because they
need a solid reflection of their own inner reality
before they can see it clearly.
Coleridge was willing to qualify his position to
allow genius some emotional contact with the outside
world, admitting that "Sensibility . . . both quick and
101
deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be
deemed a component part of genius." However, he argued
that the real work of genius is directed inward, so
that—
it is no less an essential mark of true
genius, that its sensibility is excited
by any other cause more powerfully, than
by its own personal interests; for this
plain reason, that the man of genius
lives most in the ideal world, in which
the present is still constituted by the
future or the past; and because his
feelings have been habitually associated
with thoughts and images, to the number
and clearness, and vivacity of which the
sensation of self is always in an
inverse proportion. (1: 43-44)
Like Wordsworth, Coleridge was continuing in the
tradition of Shaftesbury, who argued that artistic
creation requires withdrawal into an inner world so
that the self can be effaced from texts. Similarly,
Coleridge described an absolute genius who finds that
his spiritual vision and creativity grow as his sense
of being a self in a present world fades. But, whereas
Shaftesbury and Wordsworth suggested that writers must
eventually return to the outside world, Coleridge
envisioned the ideal poet withdrawing deeper and deeper
into his own mind, until the illusion of being a
separate mind and self dissolves. Thus, though
Coleridge's ideal poet lives in intellectual retreat,
readers who follow him will gain access to universal
102
truth, not just the musings of an isolated writer.
Such retreat must have been particularly attractive to
Coleridge, embattled as he was with personal and
professional problems. It is no wonder, therefore,
that he argued the geniuses should renounce the world,
becoming "either indifferent or resigned, with regard
to immediate reputation" (1: 33).
In presenting his genius myth in Biograohia
Literaria. Coleridge reprinted a long passage from The
Friend that lyrically emphasized the distinction
between genius and mere talent:
To find no contradiction in the union of
old and new; to contemplate the ANCIENT
of days and all his works and feelings
as fresh, as if all had then sprang
forth at the first creative fiat;
characterizes the mind that feels the
riddle of the world, and may help to
unravel it. To carry on the feelings of
childhood into the powers of manhood; to
combine the child's sense of wonder and
novelty with the appearances, which
every day for perhaps forty years had
rendered familiar; . . . this is the
character and privilege of genius, and
one of the marks which distinguish
genius from talents. (1: 80-81)
The genius who "feels the riddle of the world, and may
help to unravel it" does so by allowing himself to sink
into his own wonder and then creating texts that share
that wonder with others:
therefore is it the prime merit of
genius and its most unequivocal mode of
103
manifestation, so to represent familiar
objects as to awaken in the minds of
others a kindred feeling concerning them
and that freshness of sensation which is
the constant accompaniment of mental,
not less than of bodily, convalescence.
(l: 81)
Such sharing must always, according to Coleridge,
be indirect, arising from the poet's inner world and
not from a desire to affect readers. Wordsworth added
explanatory essays to his poems in an effort to guide
reader response. In the Bioaranhia. however, Coleridge
hinted that poems might better stand alone without
their author's self-interpretations. Such
interpretations, he implied, were more suitable to
critics who could discern beneath texts the mind of the
genius in action and thus free the poet to remain in
his own private world.
Therefore, Coleridge presented his reading of
Wordsworth as more accurate than the poet's own
theories. According to Coleridge, Wordsworth's poetry
of the seemingly commonplace shows the great
Wordsworthian mind contemplating all the objects, great
and small, of the world, and readers should learn to
allow the poet's harmonious, synthesizing genius to
wash over them. Coleridge's criticism was a gift, both
to Wordsworth and to the readers who needed a guide in
understanding his genius.
104
Coleridge also offered readers his own definition
of the poet-genius to contrast with Wordsworth's:
What is poetry? is so nearly the same
question with, what is a poet? that the
answer to the one is involved in the
solution of the other. For it is a
distinction resulting from the poetic
genius itself, which sustains and
modifies the images and thoughts, and
emotions of the poet's own mind. The
poet, described in ideal perfection,
brings the whole soul of man into
activity, with the subordination of its
faculties to each other, according to
their relative worth and dignity. He
diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity,
that blends, and (as it were) fuses.
each into each, by that synthetic and
magical power, to which we have
exclusively appropriated the name of
imagination. (2: 15-16)
Wordsworth had described the poet as a "man speaking to
men" and the process of composition as "emotion
recollected in tranquillity" until the original emotion
reappears in the poet's mind, to be filtered through
his genius into a pleasurable aesthetic creation.
Coleridge, on the other hand, emphasized the
psychological components of the genius-poet, as he
"brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the
subordination of its faculties to each other." Drawing
heavily on Schiller and Schelling, Coleridge argued for
the unifying, harmonizing, reconciling power of the
genius, which reaches from its own balanced interior
faculties outward to effect a balance in the minds of
105
others. However, where Wordsworth continually asserted
his poetic authority, Coleridge depicted a genius whose
self obliterates as his power increases, so the poet
can serve as a conduit of imaginative power, which
"reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of
opposite or discordant qualities"—
of sameness, with difference; of the
general, with the concrete; the idea,
with the image; the individual, with the
representative; the sense of novelty and
freshness, with old and familiar
objects; a more than usual state of
emotion, with more than usual order;
judgement ever awake and steady self-
possession, with enthusiasm and feeling
profound or vehement; and while it
blends and harmonizes the natural and
the artificial, still subordinates art
to nature; the manner to the matter; and
our admiration of the poet to our
sympathy with the poetry. (2: 16-17)
Wordsworth described genius as an artistic
insurrection that liberates men from the deadening
effects of modern life; Coleridge saw genius as a
gentle force that draws the reader into the private
imaginative world of a text, concealing the author's
creative efforts so that "sympathy with the poetry"
takes precedence over "admiration for the poet."
Indeed, for Coleridge, the ideal literary transaction
is one in which the author disappears, leaving behind a
text so richly imagined, so fully transformed by art
that it stands as a complete representation of his
106
genius. Whereas Wordsworth's version of the genius
myth valorized the poet as heroic contender with the
forces of evil, in Coleridge's version the poet's
genius acts to obliterate him from his text. Thus,
while Wordsworth attached prefaces and appendices to
his poems, attempting to impose on readers a mythic
interpretation of his own genius, Coleridge suggested
that poetic genius so thoroughly converts the personal
to the artistic that it is the critic who must serve as
the interpreter and defender of genius.6 That is,
though the Biocraphia contains Coleridge's tribute to
his friend's great genius, that mythic tribute placed
the power to define genius in Coleridge's own hands.7
Conclusion
In the aftermath of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth
and Coleridge constructed rival versions of a Romantic
myth of genius. One version gave the poet-genius the
theoretical right to dominate his readers' reactions;
the other described genius as an introspective power
that stands in need of critical interpretation and
guidance. In fashioning these rival myths they gave
their generation of poets and critics a choice of
idealized narrative patterns to impose on actual
107
publishing events. Writers could claim that they were
offering artistic salvation to their readers in the
form of unconventional works of art? critics, on the
other hand, could assert with equal plausibility that
proclaiming and guiding genius was their own appointed
role. In short, Romantic debates about genius were
often disputes about the relative power of authors and
their critics. Both parties paid homage to the notion
that geniuses exercise dominion over readers. But
critics continued to remind poets throughout the period
that authorial dominion extends only as far as educated
readers are willing to allow it.
In time, both versions of the Romantic myth of
genius— its inward and outward aspects— came to be so
subtly everpresent, so intricately woven into textual
readings and reported events in the period, as to be
almost invisible to post-Romantic eyes, hence
unavailable for commentary. So successful was the
Romantic attempt to shape the mental frameworks of
their audiences that we still largely function within
those parameters today. As Jerome McGann argues in The
Romantic Ideology, "the scholarship and criticism of
Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic
Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's
own self-representations" (1). There is a tendency,
that is, for the shadow of the great Romantic
108
theoretical divide to obscure our vision, both of the
gradual eighteenth-century construction of Romantic
theory and of the social exigencies facing the
Romantics, who tried to meet those demands by
constructing theories that denied their very reality.
NOTES
1. Like Southey, other early critics recorded mixed
reactions to individual poems in Lyrical Ballads. The
Analytical Review echoed Southey in denouncing the
Ancient Mariner as foreign excess: "We are not pleased
with it; in our opinion it has more of the extravagance
of a mad German poet, than of the simplicity of our
ancient ballad writers" (Reiman, pt. A, 1: 8).
Dr. Burney described the ballad as "the strangest story
of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper," but
admitted that, "though it seems a rhapsody of
unintelligible wildness and incoherence, . . . there
are in it poetical touches of an exquisite kind"
(Reiman, pt. A, 2: 714). The reviewer in the British
Critic correctly ascribed "The Ancient Mariner" to
Coleridge (not a difficult task if the reviewer was
indeed his friend Wrangham) and found the poem to
contain both "many excellencies, and many faults,"
including an inaccurate use of antiquated language
(Reiman, pt. A, 1: 128).
On the other hand, the Analytical Review disagreed
with Southey by praising both "The Thorn" and "The
Idiot Boy" as two examples of several poems "which
particularly pleased us from their character either of
simplicity or tenderness" (Reiman, pt. A, 1: 9).
Similarly, Dr. Burney managed to follow Wordsworth
through the mental twistings and turnings of this
psychological poem and told his readers:
The Idiot Bov leads the reader on from
anxiety to distress, and from distress
to terror, by incidents and alarms
which, though of the most mean and
ignoble kind, interest, frighten, and
terrify, almost to torture, during the
perusal of more than a hundred stanzas.
(Reiman, pt. A, 2: 715)
The British Critic judged "The Thorn" to have "many
beauties" and particularly praised "The Idiot Boy,"
"which, though it descends quite to common life, is
animated by much interest, and told with singular
felicity" (Reiman, pt. A, 1: 129).
2. It is important to note that 18 02 was also the year
of the debatable Peace of Amiens, so that for Jeffrey
to describe the circle around Wordsworth as a
"conspiracy" and the preface as an "act of hostility"
was to brand them as un-English, pro-French traitors.
110
3. Wordsworth's problems with Lamb did not end with
Lyrical Ballads. For an account of the continuing
drama of their relationship, see Kristine Dugas's
introduction to the Cornell edition of The White Doe of
Rvlstone.
4. While Wordsworth always reacted indignantly to
criticism, he obviously paid careful attention to his
readers' responses and regularly incorporated their
suggestions in later versions of his poems. For
example, he revised the character of the old man in
"Resolution and Independence" for publication; he
dropped from the Intimations Ode the lines to which
Coleridge objected in the Biographia; and he added
explicitly Christian lines to The Excursion when Wilson
complained that Book I was irreligious. Nevertheless,
it cannot be said that Wordsworth welcomed suggestions,
and while he made many such quiet emendations, it was
clear that he considered himself his own best critic.
5. Coleridge's plagiarism has been hotly debated since
de Quincey pointed it out soon after the critic1s death
fTait's Edinburgh Magazine [Sept. 1834]: 509-20; see
also James Ferrier, "The Plagiarisms of S. T.
Coleridge," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 47 [1840]:
287-99). For modern arguments about the issue see
Engell and Bate's introduction to their edition of the
Biographia; Norman Fruman's "Review Essay"; Thomas
McFarland's Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition;
Jerome C. Christensen's Coleridge's Blessed Machine of
Language; and Daniel Fogle's "A Composition History of
the Biographia Literaria.
6. Similarly, in Chapter 9 of the Biographia Coleridge
pays homage to the genius of Jacob Behmen (Jakob
Bohme), "the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared
think for himself" (1: 147). Yet he also presents
himself as an essential commentator to such mystics.
7. Coleridge's argument that critics wield the power
behind the throne of genius appears to reflect his
personal search for a role that was as important, if
not as prominent, as that of Wordsworth. Behind these
efforts lay a long history of self-doubt. In 1800
Coleridge struggled to complete "Christabel," which
Wordsworth first requested for the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads, then later rejected. Agonized by
self-denigrating comparisons, Coleridge announced to
mutual friends that he was finished as a poet. He
wrote his friend Tobin: "I abandon Poetry altogether—
I leave the higher & deeper Kinds to Wordsworth, the
delightful, popular & simply dignified to Southey; &
Ill
reserve for myself the honorable attempt to make others
feel and understand their writings, as they deserve to
be felt & understood" (LSTC 1: 623). Later that year he
confided in John Thelwall, "As to Poetry, I have
altogether abandoned it, being convinced that I never
had the essentials of poetic Genius, & that I mistook a
strong desire for original power" (LSTC 1: 656).
1 1 2
CHAPTER 3
THE CRITICS' REBUTTAL
In times of old, books were as religious
oracles; as literature advanced, they
next became venerable preceptors; they
then descended to the rank of
instructive friends; and as their
numbers increased, they sunk still lower
to that of entertaining companions; and
at present they seem degraded into
culprits to hold up their hands at the
bar of every self-elected, yet not the
less peremptory judge, who chuses to
write from humour or interest, from
enmity or arrogance, and to abide the
decision (in the words of Jeremy Taylor)
"of him that reads in malice, or him
that reads after dinner."
Coleridge, Biographia
In the volatile publishing world of the early
nineteenth century, the explosion of innovative
literature was greeted by an equal explosion of
anonymous critical reviews. These reviewers resisted
the dictatorial pretensions of writers like Wordsworth
and suggested that genius requires the guiding hand of
criticism to reach its full potential. This claim
parallels Coleridge's argument in the Biographia that
he was the supervisory critic to Wordsworth; however,
Romantic reviewers regarded Coleridge as part of
Wordsworth's circle, as another genius requiring
1 13
regulation by them, instead of as their critical ally.
These reviewers implicitly claimed that poetic
innovation can only be enacted within a professional
literary relationship. Poets like Wordsworth may have
wanted to dominate their readers; but critics demanded
to work in equal partnership with authors, exercising
their own specialized skills in recognizing genius,
appraising the value of works, and grooming writers for
further aesthetic achievement.
As might be expected, few early nineteenth-century
critics were willing to allow Wordsworth to establish
his own definition of genius. Indeed, a survey of
reviews published between 1800 and 1825 demonstrates
that Romantic critics countered the Wordsworthian myth
by exploiting the complex resources of this word on
their own behalf. Reviewers argued for a professional
division of labor, under which poets would attempt to
produce works of genius and those works would be
evaluated by critics, using their own literary
standards rather than those suggested by the poets
whose works were under review. Romantic critics, that
is, responded to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's versions
of the genius myth by proposing their own revisions,
writing themselves in as the arbiters of middle class
taste and the advisers of genius. True, they crowned
1 1 4
poets as literary genius-kings. But they designated
themselves the hidden powers behind the throne.1
Romantic reviewers, like earlier theorists,
discovered a powerful ambiguity in the word genius, for
they could apply it as a nearly all-purpose critical
label, invoking an array of meanings without the
necessity of decisive commitment to any of them. This
term seemed to reflect the connotative hues of the
words that surrounded it; thus critics could use genius
in reviewing major and minor, aspiring and established
literary figures of every description, applying the
term either to heap the highest critical praise on an
author or to deliver the sharpest censure. Most
frequently Romantic reviewers used genius to advance a
mixture of admiration and rebuke.
Genius as a Term of Critical Praise or Censure
When critics used genius either to praise or
denounce authors and their works, they tended to employ
the term in four basic ways: as an label for the
stature of poets; to describe a poet's originality; to
explain the emotional force of his writing; or to
recognize his peculiar literary gifts. By using the
term as a means of ranking poets in the hierarchy of
1 1 5
the literary great, Romantic critics implicitly
proclaimed themselves the literary gatekeepers of their
era, charged with admitting to the ranks of genius only
the few modern authors who deserved to be remembered
along with the geniuses of the past. Sometimes critics
offered such assessments in a tone of mild approval, as
when the Literary Chronicle in 1821 remarked, "Through
the kindness of a friend, we have been favoured with
the latest production of a gentleman of no ordinary
genius, Mr. Bysshe Shelley" (1 Dec. 1821: 751).
Frequently, however, critics used genius to advance
their strongest endorsement of an author, as in the
following assessment of Keats in the Champion in 1817:
At a time when nothing is talked of but
the power and the passion of Lord Byron,
and the playful and elegant fancy of
Moore, and the correctness of Rogers,
and the sublimity and pathos of Campbell
. . . a young man starts suddenly before
us, with a genius that is likely to
eclipse them all. (9 Mar. 1817: 78)
On the other hand, critics could attempt to deny
entrance to the ranks of the great by decrying the
absence of genius in a particular author. For example,
in April of 1805, the Edinburgh Review wrote of William
Hayley that his "indefatigable industry during a long
life, his character as a polite scholar, and his
intimacy with men of the first literary eminence" had
only partially "supplied the deficiency" in this poet
1 1 6
of "the diviner inspiration of genius." The critic
reached the prescient conclusion that, without genius,
Hayley would be remembered as a "minor poet of the
nineteenth century" (6 [1805]: 56, 60). Later that
year, the Edinburgh Review criticized William Bowles
for overestimating his own abilities and hoping "to
join the Miltons and Cowpers of his country," that is,
the ranks of genius, by attempting an ambitious poem
instead of his usual modest project:
we cannot help thinking that he either
overrated his own talents, or was not
fully aware of the difference between
the prettiness and point which may serve
to recommend a half hour's effusion, and
the continued display of genius and
skill, which is necessary to fix the
attention on a long poem. (6 [1805]:
314)
Of course, reviewers did not necessarily agree on
the rank that authors deserved, and bitter battles
frequently took place over genius. Each reviewer
presented himself as the preeminent critical judge of
authorial worth, the best experimental vessel to test
new works. For example, in the October, 1821,
Quarterly Review. W. S. Walker strongly dissented from
the judgment of other critics that Shelley was a
genius, maintaining that the "proofs of Mr. Shelley's
genius, which his admirers allege, are the very
exaggeration, copiousness of verbiage, and incoherence
1 1 7
of ideas which we complain of as intolerable."
According to Walker, these critics had confused the
poet's literary errors with his pretensions to
originality, wrongly concluding that "even the rough,
clumsy, confused structure of [Shelley's] style, with
no unfrequent violations of the rules of grammar, is,
forsooth, the sign and effect of a bold overflowing
genius, that disdains to walk in common trammels"
(26: 177).
In describing some poets as literary geniuses,
while refusing this rank to others, reviewers were
attempting to shine a critical spotlight on authors and
their works, elucidating the sources of both literary
success and failure. At the same time, critics implied
that they were the official illuminators of genius.
With the exception of Wordsworth, few poets had the
audacity to characterize themselves as geniuses, since,
in order for that label to adhere to a poet, it had to
be applied by another hand, usually the discerning hand
of a critic. Moreover, to function as authorities on
genius, critics needed to demonstrate an educated
familiarity with the literature of the past as well as
the present. Only then would a critic be able to place
a Romantic author accurately, or at least convincingly,
in the ranks of genius.
1 18
But the claim of Romantic critics that they
functioned as a power behind the throne of genius
tended to take quite subtle forms, since it would have
been as unseemly for a reviewer to usurp the attention
properly due an author, as it was for a poet to attempt
to crown himself. Indeed, if writers were to be
presented as geniuses, they had to appear to the
reading public as worthy literary leaders rather than
mere followers. Romantic reviews, therefore, generally
focused on the genius and his ability to blaze new
artistic paths that were so treacherous that no mere
imitators could follow them. For instance, in a review
of Lichtenberg's Miscellaneous Works, the Edinburgh
Review made the following judgment:
Schiller, unquestionably a man of
uncommon genius, is the avowed model of
those poets, novelists, and playwrights,
who, without any genius at all, have
succeeded in captivating the public
attention, by an engaging display of
furious lovers, frantic heroines,
blasphemers, fatalists, and anarchists
of every description. (3 [1804]: 345)
Again in 1804, the Edinburgh Review informed its
readers that it was the genius of Guidi that allowed
him to write Pindaric odes that could not be possibly
be copied: "The Italian critics . . . acknowledge his
merit; but warn other writers to decline a career in
which without the extraordinary genius of Guidi, they
1 1 9
would inevitably fail" (5 [1804]: 49). The European
Magazine even argued in 1819 that Wordsworth's great
genius had lured him to break an uncertain trail over
new ground, writing about such tedious subjects that
other poets should scorn to follow his lead:
In the first rank of the bards of our
own day, Mr. Wordsworth may justly be
classed. With that boldness which is
the characteristic of genius, he has
chosen a path rarely trodden by poets,
and has shed over his uninviting and
apparently sterile subjects an elegance
and brilliancy which nothing but the
energetic influence of such talents as
he possesses could have communicated.
(75 [1819]: 445)
One of the conditions entitling a Romantic writer
to the rank of genius was to be a leader among poets,
possibly even someone who was leading his lesser
disciples astray. Another slightly different
qualification was originality, defined as authorial
innovations that may or may not have been followed by
others. Here, too, lay substantial grounds for
disagreement. In 1814 Charles Lamb argued in the
Quarterly Review that false critics and an unprepared
reading public had unfairly misinterpreted and
denounced the innovative genius of Wordsworth: "The
causes," he declared, "which have prevented the poetry
of Mr. Wordsworth from attaining its full share of
popularity are to be found in the boldness and
1 2 0
originality of his genius.” Lamb went on to complain
bitterly,
The times are past when a poet could
securely follow the direction of his own
mind into whatever tracts it might lead.
A writer, who would be popular, must
timidly coast the shore of prescribed
sentiment and sympathy. He must have
just as much more of the imaginative
faculty than his readers, as will serve
to keep their apprehensions from
stagnating, but not so much as to alarm
their jealousy. He must not think or
feel too deeply. (12 [1814]: 110)
By ascribing the poet's unpopularity to his
original genius, Lamb threw his critical support on the
side of Wordsworth's claim that he was setting a new
standard for literature. The majority of critics
judiciously kept such power for themselves, maintaining
that they alone could decide whether a newly published
work was original art, a violation of true artistic
standards, or simply evidence of the poet's insane
disregard for the reactions of others. Once more,
there was no guarantee that various critics would agree
on a critical standard by which to judge originality;
indeed, the innovative nature of poetic originality
made it difficult, if not impossible, to formulate new
standards quickly, and critics were often reduced to
claiming that they recognized originality when they saw
it. In 1820, a reviewer in Gold's London Magazine
praised the "alchymical properties of genius" evident
1 2 1
in the minor poems printed with Shelley's "Prometheus
Unbound" (2 [1820]: 306). In reviewing Shelley's
"Alastor," however, the British Critic sarcastically
deplored the poet's excessively imaginative genius,
arguing that "[i]f this gentleman is not blessed with
the inspiration, he may at least console himself with
the madness of a poetic mind":
We cannot do sufficient justice to the
creative fancy of our poet. A man's
hair singing dirges, and a boat pausing
and shuddering, are among the least of
his inventions; nature for him reverses
all her laws, the streams ascend. The
power of the syphon we all know, but it
is for the genius of Mr. Shelley to make
the streams run up hill. (5 [1816]:
545, 546)
Whether offering praise or blame to poets, lauding
their genius or lamenting its effects, critics were
carving out for themselves a role as both evaluators of
genius and its guides, ready to point the way for truly
original works of art and to warn poets of the dangers
of improper innovation. The British Review announced
in 1817 that its official critical aim was to heal
Byron's ailing poetic genius: "As we have long
considered Lord Byron as our patient," wrote William
Roberts, the anonymous reviewer, "every resource of our
medical skill has been exerted upon his morbid
intellect." Roberts went on to denounce Manfred as a
"new deformed bantling of Lord Byron's muse, scarcely
1 2 2
better than an abortion in moral form and structure,
but nourished, and cradled, and rocked, as all his
progeny have been, by the hand of a fostering genius."
Wordsworth was claiming that his poetic genius could
heal the ailing British reading public of its degraded
aesthetic taste; Roberts used a similar medical
metaphor to claim the critic's equal power in healing
disordered genius. A critic who described himself as
merely a judge of genius would doubtless have needed to
admit contrary arguments and defenses to his critical
courtroom. By comparing himself to a physician,
however, Roberts boldly proclaimed that he would apply
critical remedies to a poetic patient who was so
deranged that his own fevered preferences did not need
to be taken into account.
In addition to using genius to rank authors or
evaluate their originality, Romantic critics also used
this term as a measure of an author's emotional force,
the power he had over his readers. This sense of
genius implied that a great poet's originality enables
him to lead his readers toward an acceptance of
innovative forms of art. Blackwood * s Edinburgh
Magazine praised Wordsworth in 1820 for the powerful
effect he had on the British reading public, despite
his supposed unpopularity: "Ever since Wordsworth
began to write," this reviewer argued, "he has fixed
1 2 3
the attention of every genuine lover and student of
English Poetry; and all along he has received from
these the tribute of honour due to the felt and
received power of his genius'1 (7 [1820] : 206-07) . Yet
another indication of genius for Romantic reviewers was
that a "genuine lover and student of English Poetry"
would feel the power of genius as he read certain
works, even though the majority of readers might fail
to respond in the same way. The obvious snag in this
theory of reader-proven genius is that it replaced the
difficult task of sifting literature for works of
genius with the equally difficult task of choosing the
readers who are qualified to respond authoritatively to
poetry. Most critics defined a "genuine lover and
student of English Poetry" as any reader who agreed
with them.
A frequent variation of this argument was to
suggest that works of genius possess such rhetorical
power that they force readers to respond to their
innovative techniques. For example, when Jeffrey
admired Walter Scott's genius in adapting medieval
romance for The Lav of the Last Minstrel. he asserted
that Scott's considerable genius was bent toward
changing the taste of his readers:
The author, enamoured of the lofty
visions of chivalry, and partial to the
strains in which they were formerly
1 2 4
embodied, seems to have employed all the
resources of his genius in endeavouring
to recal them to the favour and
admiration of the public, and in
adapting to the taste of modern readers,
a species of poetry which was once the
delight of the courtly, but has long
ceased to gladden any other eyes than
those of the scholar and the antiquary.
(6 [1805]: 1)
Wordsworth made it clear that he aimed to create an
audience that would appreciate his poetry; Jeffrey
discerned the same motivation in Scott.
Critics like Jeffrey could accept, and even
admire, the rhetorical influence exerted by geniuses
who agreed with them. Nevertheless, these same
reviewers openly admitted their concern over the moral
corruption that might be spread by wayward writers
among an uneducated reading populace. In 1807 Francis
Jeffrey defended his attacks on Lyrical Ballads by
arguing that it was the very power of the Lake Poets'
genius that made him fear that they could seduce
readers into accepting their misguided theories:
It was precisely because the
perverseness and bad taste of this new
school was combined with a great deal of
genius and of laudable feeling, that we
were afraid of their spreading and
gaining ground among us, and that we
entered into the discussion with a
degree of zeal and animosity which some
might think unreasonable towards
authors, to whom so much merit had been
conceded. (11 [1807]: 215)
1 2 5
The potential for literary contamination seemed so
great to reviewers that they vowed to keep a constant
watch over the untrustworthy morals and aesthetics of
writers. Wordsworth was Jeffrey's early adversary.
But Byron would become the most universally popular and
yet the most feared genius of the later Romantic
Period.2 For it was Byron who seemed driven to push
against the limits, not only of art, but of proper
British morality. In an 1816 issue of the Champion.
one reviewer recorded his concern that Byron apparently
delighted in corrupting his readers:
. . . now that we find Lord Byron
running riot on the strength of his
neglects, waxing more and more insolent
because of indulgence, and forcing upon
us, as food of the mind, what, if report
be true, turns his own stomach,—
criticism can scarcely be accused of
captiousness, if it protests strongly
against this perversion of poetical
talent, this corruption of feeling, and
arrogant disregard of what is due to
consciousness and obligation. (11 Feb.
1816: 46)
Like Roberts, the reviewer in the Champion described
Byron as a sick man in need of critical bloodletting,
and he extended this medical metaphor so far as to
label the poet a contagious threat to public health:
The great mischief is, that these fiery
applications destroy the healthy tone of
the public’s sensibility: they lead it
to cherish that fatal fondness for quick
and forced excitement, which utterly
1 2 6
kills in the mind the capacity of
serious enjoyment of natural
sentiment;— the niceties of genuine
character and situation are deemed
feeble and tedious after these
seductions of exaggeration and
artifice. (46)
This reviewer was arguing that "the common taste"
of nineteenth-century readers was rendering them
susceptible to artistic and moral corruption by Byron's
genius. The critic, however, experienced no difficulty
extricating himself from the spell of Byron's genius,
for on closer study it became clear that—
His exhibitions are those of a magic
lanthorn,— shadowy, coarse, and
confused,— producing their effects
through trick rather than skill; very
wonderful and striking in the opinion of
the multitude,— interesting, at first to
better judges, but felt to be tiresome,
tawdry, and poor, when too often
repeated. (46)
Again, critics argued that originality is difficult to
distinguish from wayward genius, they could also
maintain that "better judges" (that is, they
themselves) could not long be fooled by the shifting
face of genius. The power of genius, then, to sway an
audience was to be limited by the legitimate literary
standards set by Romantic critics.
Moreover, it was possible to argue that the genius
of poets can fall under the thrall of evil influences,
which then reach through texts to corrupt the audience.
1 2 7
Such situations seemed to demand intervention by a
reviewer who could rescue readers, and perhaps even the
poet himself, from his own degenerate genius. Roberts
argued in the British Review that Byron was under a
sick and wicked enchantment, drawing the poet
continually to a single subject, the emotional agonies
of the "Byronic hero”:
One only character has absorbed the
whole of Lord Byron's creative power.
"The steady aspect of one clear large
star," of demoniac influence, has
fascinated his genius, and we perfectly
despair of ever seeing the spell broken,
and a natural, free, and wholesome
exercise of those very superior talents
which he unquestionably possesses.
(10 [1817]: 87)
At worst, critics could warn their readers to
avoid entirely the most corrupt, and corrupting, works
of deviant genius. At best, however, critics argued
that they could instruct genius and direct it aright,
if poets would only listen to their greater wisdom.
Geniuses who had mistaken error for originality, those
who were corrupting their readers, those who were
themselves suffering under the deluding spell of
perverted literature could save themselves by heeding
the counsel of critics. The most insightful counsel
that critics could offer an author was to show him the
true nature of his own genius and the paths that he
should follow to its full and proper development. This
1 2 8
was, of course, another implicit claim that it is
critics, not authors, who possess the power to discern
individual genius and envision its potential. Genius
itself, according to this view, is not enough. Poets
also need critical guides to their own hearts and
minds.
Yet different critics were apt to offer poets
confusingly disparate interpretations of the true
nature of their genius. William Hazlitt complained in
the Examiner in 1816 that Coleridge was "a man of that
universality of genius, that his mind hangs suspended
between poetry and prose, truth and falsehood, and an
infinity of other things, and from an excess of
capacity, he does little or nothing" (2 June 1816:
348). The next year, the British Critic published its
own guide to Coleridge's genius, declaring that
wildness of imagination is the
predominant quality of his genius, but
it is so apt to degenerate into
extravagance, that if we except his
'Ancient mariner,' the verses called
'Love,' and perhaps a few, and but a few
others, which might be mentioned, we
think the character of his poetry is far
from being pleasing. (8 [1817]: 461)
The Edinburgh Magazine agreed that extravagance was the
hallmark of the Coleridgean genius, and this journal
maintained that "The Ancient Mariner" offered "a very
good caricature of the genius of the author," for the
1 2 9
poem "displays, in fact, all the strength and all the
weakness,— all the extravagancies and eccentricities,—
all the bold features, and peculiar grimace, . . . of
his intellectual physiognomy. ..." This disagreement
about Coleridge's genius is perhaps to be expected.
After all, even the reviewer in the Edinburgh Magazine
admitted that "Nothing is more difficult than to
characterize correctly the genius of an author whose
productions possess so many opposite qualities, and
whose excellencies and extravagancies are so curiously
blended" (176, 177-81).
Critics also offered other Romantic poets
descriptions of their genius. Whatever their value to
poets, such assessments were particularly useful to
critics themselves as they labored to identify unsigned
work, characterize newly published authors, and
understand the latest literary innovations of familiar
writers. For example, in reviewing the anonymous
"Beppo" in the Edinburgh Review. Francis Jeffrey
recognized "the ardent genius of Byron" in the
rapturous passages of this poem, despite its
experimental departure from the poet's usual style and
genre (29 [1818]: 306). Jeffrey also wrote of the Lake
Poets that, in addition to a distinctive style, "their
genius has also an internal character; and the
peculiarities of their taste may be discovered, without
1 3 0
the assistance of their diction," for "after great
familiarity of language, there is nothing that appears
to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of
thought" (ER 1 [1802]: 69). Leigh Hunt noted in the
Indicator that Keats's genius was characterized by
"energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take
leave of the other, and possessing, in their union, a
high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors
who can less combine them" (9 Aug. 182 0: 352). And in
the Edinburgh Review Hazlitt lamented the "morbid
genius and vivifying soul" evident in Shelley's Triumph
of Life (40 [1824]: 504).
Once critics asserted the true nature of a
writer's genius, they frequently attempted to dictate
the pattern of any future productions. For instance,
in reviewing Joanna Baillie's Miscellaneous Plays, the
Edinburgh Review asserted that "Miss Baillie cannot
possibly write a tragedy, nor an act indeed of a
tragedy, without showing genius and exemplifying a more
dramatic conception and expression than any of her
modern competitors"; however, the reviewer warned,
"Miss Baillie positively must not write comedies," for
"[s]he wants that talent; and she has higher talents"
(5 [1805]: 406, 411). The playwright presumably
believed that she possessed the ability to produce
comedies as well as tragedies; at least, she had made
1 3 1
the experiment of writing both. Her critic claimed,
however, that he possessed the superior knowledge to
advise her of appropriate projects. From an anonymous
distance, he attempted to control Baillie*s career,
managing her work according to his own vision of her
capabilities.
Other critics made explicit this premise that the
individual genius is a force needing direction from the
critic to attain its potential for complete power. The
Edinburgh Magazine advised Coleridge:
. . . if Mr Coleridge would give his
mind more exclusively to what appears to
us to be his true vocation, and would
carefully avoid those extravagancies of
sentiment and singularities of
expression to which we have slightly
alluded, we have no doubt that he might
yet produce a work which would place him
in the first rank of British poets,—
which would entirely justify the high
opinion very generally entertained of
the capabilities of his genius. . . .
(Romantic Bards 182)
The Monthly Review issued an even stronger edict to
Shelley while commenting on "Rosalind and Helen": "We
regret . . . to see so considerable a portion of real
genius wasted in merely desultory fires; and still more
do we lament to observe such extensive infidelity in
the mind of a writer who is evidently capable of better
things" (90 [1819]: 207). Similarly, while reviewing
the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage the
1 3 2
Monthly Review gave the poet some free advice: "we
think very highly of Lord Byron's genius: but we hope
that he will in future endeavour to excite a more
powerful interest than his present plan allowed . . .
by unity of story, connection of incidents, and
distinctness . . . of character" (68 [1812]: 82).
Typically, critics attempted to guide writers by
pointing out the flaws that were unfortunately and
perhaps inextricably mixed with their genius.
Frequently, a note of resignation crept into these
critical discussions of the flaws associated with
genius. Addison, and Longinus before him, argued that
flaws were inherently linked with the works of genius.
John Gibson Lockhart agreed, maintaining that "There is
. . . a strong love of genius in the people of this
country, and they are willing to pardon to its
possessor much extravagance and error— nay, even more
serious transgressions" (Blackwood1s 6 [1819]: 154).
Nevertheless, critics assumed responsibility for
informing geniuses of any habitual literary flaws so
that they could fight their characteristic weaknesses.
Depending on whether critics wanted to strike an
overall note of praise or blame, they might choose
either to discount the flaws in a given author or to
emphasize them, but they seemed determined rarely to
pass over them in silence. In 182 0, the Monthly Review
133
began its comments on Lamia by noting, "This little
volume must and ought to attract attention, for it
displays the ore of true poetic genius, though mingled
with a large portion of dross" (92 [1820]: 305). Keats
was also accused of "extravagance" in Jeffrey's review
of Endvmion and Lamia in the Edinburgh Review. Jeffrey
began by stating, "We had never happened to see either
of these volumes till very lately— and have been
exceedingly struck with the genius they display, and
the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their
extravagance." He then attributed the flaws associated
with Keats1s genius to the poet1s youth—
his whole works, indeed, bear evidence
enough of the fact. They are full of
extravagance and irregularity, rash
attempts at originality, interminable
wanderings, and excessive obscurity.
They manifestly require, therefore, all
the indulgence that can be claimed for a
first attempt:— but we think it no less
plain that they deserve it. . . . (34
[1820]: 203-04)
It would be possible, argued Jeffrey, for a "malicious
critic" to ridicule Endvmion. However, "we do not take
that to be our office"; this poem, he wrote, "is . . .
at least as full of genius as of absurdity," making it
the critic's duty to point out literary sins, but only
while reassuring the poet who committed them of his
genuine creative gifts (205).
1 34
The obvious cause of Keats’s flaws was his youth;
critics found other possible sources, however, for
flaws in older geniuses, past and present. For
example, they argued that the vulgarity and roughness
of Burns's poetry was not the result of deliberate
aesthetic choice but was instead due to his lack of
education and a refined social circle. Nineteenth-
century critics both romanticized and disparaged
Burns's work, contending that his genius was the
innate, untutored ability of a modern primitive who had
failed to avail himself of the resources of eighteenth-
century civilization. In 1809, the Religues of Burns
was published, prompting Jeffrey to reassess the poet
in the Edinburgh Review;
the leading vice in Burns's character,
and the cardinal deformity indeed of all
his productions, was his contempt, or
affectation of contempt, for prudence,
decency and regularity; and his
admiration of thoughtlessness, oddity,
and vehement sensibility;— his belief,
in short, in the dispensing power of
genius and social feeling, in all
matters of morality and common sense.
(13 [1809]: 253)
Jeffrey was arguing that Burns, like Wordsworth and
Byron, relied too heavily on his own native genius and
spurned the social correction that might have made him
a wiser man and a better poet. The critic judged that
Burns's "thoughtlessness, inflammability and
1 3 5
imprudence," along with his "odious slang,1 1 had caused
the "disgust with which, in spite of his genius, we
know that he is regarded by many very competent and
liberal judges" (254). Yet, despite these grave flaws,
the critic concluded, "With the allowances and
exceptions we have now stated, we think Burns entitled
to the rank of a great and original genius" (255). The
Quarterly Review agreed, contending that the poet's
genius had in effect done him in:
The extravagance of genius with which
this wonderful man was gifted, being in
his later and more evil days directed to
no fixed or general purpose, was, in the
morbid state of his health and feelings,
apt to display itself in hasty sallies
of virulent and unmerited
severity. .. . (1 [1809]: 19)
While Keats's "extravagance" could be ascribed to
his youth, the vulgarity of Burns's poetry was
attributed to his social circumstances and to the
impulsive emotions that both fueled his genius and
hampered its growth. It was presumed that Burns's lack
of aesthetic society and his own headstrong nature had
set in motion a destructive cycle. Given stronger
social constraints, the poet might have been able to
check his own emotional genius; given more willingness
to be controlled, he might have sought out the help
that he was thought to have needed.
1 3 6
The most common literary flaw that Romantic
critics thought they discerned in contemporary texts
was the unlucky combination of bad taste with great
genius, both defined according to the reviewer's
individual lights. Typically, a Romantic critic used
the word taste to insinuate that there was indeed a
consensus of educated responses to art, a consensus
that was easily discerned in his own particular
judgments of the work in question. Every critic
suggested that his opinions alone were trustworthy
guides to writers and the reading public; the many
contrary judgments were always presumed to originate in
the flawed taste (and genius) of others.
By recommending that poets reform their literary
taste, critics attempted to apply a social remedy to
the fevered inventions of genius. Unfortunately, any
authorial genius who might have gone looking for such
treatment would have found that the suggested therapies
were nearly as various as the critics themselves.
Moreover, the critical remedies offered were frequently
so strong that they would have been distasteful, even
to the mildest of authors. When Francis Jeffrey
reviewed The Excursion in 1814, he greeted his old
nemesis Wordsworth with the most famous opening line of
a Romantic critical review— "This will never do":
1 3 7
Long habits of seclusion, and an
excessive ambition of originality, can
alone account for the disproportion
which seems to exist between this
author's taste and his genius; or for
the devotion with which he has
sacrificed so many precious gifts at the
shrine of those paltry idols which he
has set up for himself among his lakes
and his mountains.
According to Jeffrey's professional diagnosis,
Wordsworth's genius needed to be supplemented with an
improvement in his taste.3 And this strong upholder
of neoclassical values would never have admitted that
there was any confusion about what good taste was:
An habitual and general knowledge of the
few settled and permanent maxims, which
form the canon of general taste in all
large and polished societies— a certain
tact, which informs us at once that many
things, which we still love and are
moved by in secret, must necessarily be
despised as childish, or derided as
absurd, in all such societies— though it
will not stand in the place of genius,
seems necessary to the success of its
exertions. . . . (24 [1814]: 3)
Obviously, Jeffrey believed that a "few settled
and permanent maxims" still guided the literary world,
and were equally available to both critic and poet.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was rebelling against
just such a set of expectations that works of art
should adhere to preexisting standards. Jeffrey had by
no means mistaken the poet's intentions; he understood
clearly that the Wordsworthian aesthetic was a
1 3 8
revolutionary assault on conventional taste. Yet he
insisted on the right to exercise his prerogative as a
co-participant in literary transactions and refused to
transfer his allegiance from the older standards to the
new.
Jeffrey's reviews and Wordsworth's prefaces and
essays argued past one other, each insisting on the
right to control their literary relationship.
Nevertheless, they actually shared considerable common
ground, for each recognized the frustrating necessity
of dealing with the other in these delicate artistic
negotiations. Never, despite their mutual
unwillingness to give in, did Wordsworth or Jeffrey
abandon their efforts to reach one another.
Writer. Reader, and Critic
When Romantic critics and poets struggled to
define genius, they were also struggling to define the
roles and relationships of literary interactions. Such
definitions, they hoped, could resolve the power
struggle that had become inevitable when writers and
readers no longer shared a single set of literary
expectations and values. But resolution would be
difficult as long as both writers and their critics
1 3 9
claimed that the legitimate power to define literature
and its relationships lay with them. Wordsworth
asserted the authority to dictate the nature of poetry
to his audience, unhampered by critical predispositions
toward false art. Critics, on the other hand, claimed
to be the teachers of the general reading public,
helping them appreciate true art, and also claimed to
be the guides to the writer's proper use of his own
genius. Authors and critics could not, and usually did
not, expect to agree with each other's claims; instead,
they fought over the support of the book- and journal-
buying public. Thus, in 1811, the Edinburgh Review
accepted the fact that—
Mr Southey, of course, despises equally
our censure and our advice; and we have
no quarrel with him for this. We have
been too long conversant with the
untractable generation of authors, to
expect that our friendly expostulations
should have any effect upon them,—
except as exponents of the silent,
practical judgment of the public. To
that superior tribunal, however, we do
think ourselves entitled to refer; and
while we, who profess the stately office
of correcting and instructing, are yet
willing, in most things, to bow to its
authority, we really cannot help
thinking, that a poet, whose sole object
is to give delight and to gain glory,
ought to show something of the same
docility. (17 [1811]: 429-30)
This reviewer argued that both poet and critics
retained the privilege of making "another and a final
1 4 0
appeal— to Posterity." Such appeals were the
particular right of unpopular poets, those who felt
unfairly maligned in their own generation. Critics,
too, could point toward the future, insisting that at
some distant time they would be proven to have been
correct in all their judgments on contemporary poets.
Neither critics nor writers, of course, had actual
access to posterity, and both sides used this argument
as a final resort when no other rhetorical support
could be found for their claims of power over one
another. For, despite these rather arrogant
declarations of faith in future generations, Romantic
authors and critics were stuck with one another,
squared off against opponents with equal power. Though
both authors and critics occasionally referred to the
reading public as a court of last resort on matters of
literary merit, they seem to have considered themselves
to be a duelling literary elite, vastly superior to the
general populace in knowledge and taste. Ultimately,
of course, both parties were obligated to the buying
public for their employment. The common reader,
however, had no public forum in which to engage either
authors or critics in literary battle.
In addition, the broad field of differences among
critics encouraged them to disparage one another as
ignorant or perverse exponents of false taste and
1 41
enemies to true original genius. Individual Romantic
critics often claimed that they themselves were free of
uncharitable eagerness to exercise their wit on hapless
writers, which was assumed to be the stock attitude of
critics toward authors. Many reviewers began their
articles by distancing themselves from such falsely
carping criticism. For example, the Quarterly Review
offered a mock apology to its readers in 18 09 for its
failure to produce witty, cutting remarks on Thomas
Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming:
We are perfectly aware that, according
to the modern canons of criticism, the
Reviewer is expected to shew his immense
superiority to the author reviewed, and
at the same time to relieve the
tediousness of narration by turning the
epic, dramatic, moral story before him
into quaint and lively burlesque.
(1 [1809]: 254)
Similarly, the Critical Review admitted in 1816 that
critics all too often made their own reputation by
damaging that of authors—
There is no quality of the mind more
despicable than that love of censure and
ridicule which has its origin in our own
weakness, and which hunts for faults or
singularities, not for the purpose of
amending them, but for the sake of
gratifying an imaginary superiority:
those who thus flatter their vanity by
reducing genius to the degraded level of
their own understandings. . . .
(3 [1816]: 504
142
Critics aimed these disavowals at readers who
judged criticism to be potentially as harmful as genius
gone awry. Indeed, many believed criticism to be so
powerful a force in the literary world that reviewers
held the upper hand over weak and helpless genius. In
a review of Wordsworth's River Duddon in 182 0,
Blackwood's Magazine expressed doubts that critics had
performed any service at all for Romantic genius: "how
lamentably must we feel the worthlessness of all the
criticism of the most critical age ever the world
produced" (7 [1820]: 206). In the ongoing tug-of-war
between authors and critics, this reviewer (possibly
John Wilson) sided with the Wordsworths of the
nineteenth century, arguing that criticism had done
nothing to aid the rise of genius and had merely
succeeded in impeding its original work. He argued
that the greatest geniuses would eventually overcome
the spiteful attacks of their critics, as Wordsworth
had done, but held that the great poet's effort had
left him with a wounded and overly sensitive heart.
According to this critical spokesman for the
poet's point of view, reviewers had little positive
power, little ability to heal the supposed disorders of
genius. All they had was the power to make poetic
derangements worse. He argued, for instance, that if
Wordsworth began his poetic career with an inclination
143
toward stubborn egotism, that vice had only been made
worse by the bitter criticism heaped on him by his
opponents. Thus this critic ascribed the very flaws
that Wordsworth's critics denounced to their own clumsy
intervention in his art:
The senseless and boyish clamours with
which they pursued a few trivial
singularities of one of the proudest of
men, probably served no purpose
whatever, except that of confirming him
in the belief, that what such people
took upon them to consider as wrong,
must of necessity be right. (212)
This reviewer suggested that it was the critic's
duty to treat genius with sufficient delicacy and
respect to encourage its development and gently correct
its errors. He described, that is, a relationship in
which the genius remains a perpetual pseudo-child,
needing the protection, indulgence, and encouragement
of those around him in order to produce the highest
art. In the Bioaraohia Coleridge described the genius
as ideally inhabiting an inner world that is cut off
from, the cares of real-world publication. This
reviewer took the Coleridgean myth a step further,
arguing that geniuses inhabit an aesthetic world of
eternal childlike sensitivity, helpless to defend
themselves from the onslaughts of an unappreciative
literary world. According to this theory, geniuses
require, not only a submissive inner circle of admirers
144
like the one clustered around Wordsworth, but also a
circle of parental critics who carefully withhold all
judgments that would offend and wound the poets'
impressionable hearts. Wordsworth himself was indeed
sensitive to a fault; but he was also quite capable of
defending himself in print, and, if he read this
criticism, he was probably displeased at the reviewer's
attitude of mingled hero-worship and condescension.
For if critics need to nurture genius or keep quiet
about its flaws, genius must be too fragile to hold its
own in a genuine confrontation. Wordsworth, on the
other hand, continued to hope that his genius could win
over readers and critics in a fair rhetorical fight.
Even Romantic critics who had no fears about
mature poets expressed concern about the sensitive
young geniuses who might sustain severe wounds before
they were strong enough to resist critical attacks.
Josiah Conder presented a minority opinion in the
Eclectic Review, arguing that criticism could either
hurt or help young poets:
The case has occurred, when a phlegmatic .
Reviewer, in a fit of morning spleen, or
of after-dinner dulness, has had it in
his power to dash to the ground, by his
pen, the innocent hopes of a youth
struggling for honourable distinction
amid all the disadvantages of poverty,
or to break the bruised reed of a tender
and melancholy spirit; but such an
opportunity of doing mischief must of
necessity be happily rare. Instances
145
have also been, in which the
performances of maturer life have fully
redeemed the splendid pledge afforded by
the young Author, in his first crude and
unequal effort, with which he has had to
thank the stern critic that he did not
rest self-satisfied. (8 [1817]: 274-75)
More often, however, critics feared that their
clumsier colleagues would either blast youthful genius
on the vine or twist it against its true nature.
Baldwin’s London Magazine maintained in 182 0 that the
reading public had come to detest critics, in part
because of the attacks of critics on young poets:
The public, and public critics, mutually
serve and despise each other; and if
both, for the most part, know that this
is the case, the latter are too politic
to complain of injustice, and the former
too indolent to resent it. Each party
is content to accept the evil with the
good.
But a feeling much stronger than
that of contempt has attached itself to
this part of the public press, in
consequence of certain attempts of
modern criticism to blight and wither
the maturity of genius; or— still
worse— to change its youthful enthusiasm
into despair, and thus tempt it to
commit suicide; or— worst of all— to
creep to its cradle, and strangle it in
the first bloom and beauty of its
childhood. (1 [1820]: 380)
The main danger, according to this reviewer, was that
young poets might be forced by their attackers to
abandon any attempt to communicate with an audience,
withdrawing into a literary world with a population of
146
one. He pleaded with critics to treat young poets with
the utmost care, for, even if established poets did not
need nurturing, these young men did:
let us, even for our own sakes, beware
of withholding from youthful poets the
fame which they covet;— let us beware of
heaping ridicule even upon their faults;
lest, in revenge, they learn to keep to
themselves the gift which was bestowed
on them for the benefit of their fellow-
beings, and be satisfied with finding in
poetry "its own reward." (388)
Obviously some Romantic critics feared that open
war with poets carried the risk of driving poets deeper
inside the inviolability of their own genius. It was a
delicate matter, then as now, to conduct an on-going
literary relationship through the medium of printed
texts. Critics were justifiably concerned that they
could lose contact with, and thus power over, the poets
whose genius they were trying to direct. Clearly
Wordsworth's stubborn insistence on his own authorial
power prompted some reviewers to lament their fellow
critics' egotism as much as the poet's, and those who
appreciated him sadly watched the poet meet attacks by
receding into the mythic narrative he built around his
own genius. Wordsworth at least acknowledged that his
goal was to establish an audience for himself. Younger
poets, it was feared, might eschew rhetorical goals
altogether and lapse into solipsism.
147
While some critics defended poets by lamenting the
negative power of their fellow reviewers, others held
that poets always possess the rhetorical avenue of
appealing directly to their readers. In 1819 John
Gibson Lockhart in Blackwood's Magazine berated one of
Shelley's reviewers as "a dunce rating a man of
genius." Lockhart then took his case for Shelley's
genius to the journal readers who had presumably
already been educated in good taste by Blackwood's;
If that critic does not know that Mr
Shelley is a poet, almost in the very
highest sense of that mysterious word,
then, we appeal to all those whom we
have enabled to judge for themselves, if
he be not unfit to speak of poetry
before the people of England.
(6 [1819]: 154)
Lockhart's argument acknowledged the rather obvious
fact that Romantic poets and their devoted readers had
an ongoing relationship of their own in addition to one
that was mediated by critics. Ordinary readers might
not have a forum for addressing authors, but authors
had their works, which they use to reach an audience
without the need for critical intervention.
Lockhart implied that it is through legitimate
critical journals— for example, Blackwood's— that
ordinary readers become empowered to judge for
themselves, or, rather, to make the kind of judgments
that reviewers have shown them how to make. "It is
148
not," he concluded, "in the power of all the critics
alive to blind one true lover of poetry"— that is, one
reader trained by critics like Lockhart— "to the
splendour of Mr Shelley's genius . . (154). The
ideal function of criticism, according to Lockhart, is
to help readers enter into a mutually beneficial
relationship with genius, responding sympathetically to
poets instead of provoking them with attacks. Readers
who are engaged in a literary transaction with genius
can easily resist the temptation of accepting the
critical judgments of those who have not entered into
such a bond with the poet:
There is, we firmly believe, a strong
love of genius in the people of this
country, and they are willing to pardon
to its possessor much extravagance and
error— nay, even more serious
transgressions. Let both Mr Shelley and
his critic think of that— let it
encourage the one to walk onwards to his
bright destiny, without turning into
dark or doubtful or wicked ways— let it
teach the other to feel a proper sense
of his own insignificance, and to be
ashamed, in the midst of his own
weaknesses and deficiencies and
meannesses, to aggravate the faults of
the highly-gifted, and to gloat with a
sinful satisfaction on the real or
imaginary debasement of genius and
intellect. (154)
According to Lockhart, true criticism is a
partnership among three parties— the poet, the critic,
and the common reader— each of whom must be willing to
149
learn from the others and teach in return. Yes, the
critic is to encourage genius and point the way to "his
bright destiny"; but he should always remember "his own
insignificance" compared to the artistic power of the
genius-poet. As Lockhart saw it, poets, critics, and
readers must sustain this sense of partnership if they
are to forgive one another minor lapses in
understanding and disagreements about taste. Yet this
partnership quickly evaporates whenever writers cross
some unwritten boundary between originality with its
attendant flaws and the blatantly hostile act of
violating cherished social standards.
Among a noteworthy group of revolutionary poets,
the most flagrant violator of the Romantic Period was
Byron, who had a tempestuous relationship with both his
critics and his readers. His early work Hours of
Idleness (1807) received a biting critical censure from
the Edinburgh Review. The poet, in turn, retaliated by
publishing his first major satire, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers. in which he subjected Francis
Jeffrey, among other contemporary critics and poets, to
his ridicule. This poem, though it did not amuse the
Edinburgh Review, won Byron the support of the minor
review journals and a considerable English readership.
That audience then greeted the appearance of the first
two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) with
1 5 0
such avid enthusiasm that the first edition sold out in
days. In Byron's words, he awoke one morning and found
himself famous.
Though the reviews, as usual, mixed praise for
Byron's genius with censure for his flaws, even Jeffrey
recognized the "very considerable power, spirit, and
originality of this poem" (ER 19 [1812]: 466). Byron's
readers and critics responded powerfully to Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, and a series of other poems on
vaguely oriental subjects followed: The Giaour (1813) ;
The Bride of Abvdos (1813); The Corsair (1814); Lara
(1814); and The Siege of Corinth (1816).
Up to a point, this famous and popular poet
managed to retain his critics' and readers' love while
flouting their moral and aesthetic standards. But
after his highly publicized separation from his wife in
1816 and his departure from England, more and more of
Byron's critics had had enough. The Champion warned
Byron in 1816 that he was breaking an unstated contract
with his reading public that, after publishing his
works, he would carefully consider his readers'
reactions before continuing in the same creative vein:
it may at last become the duty of
criticism to declare to even a noble
author, that he who engages in the
highest labours of Literature, makes a
serious engagement: that, after a
certain time, it is demanded of him that
what he submits to the public taste and
1 51
understanding, which must help to adjust
the public reputation of the period,
should at least bear his own serious
reflection,— and not be like the
effusions of the evening's intoxication,
which are repented of in the morning's
fit of nausea. (11 Feb. 1816: 45)
According to this reviewer, Byron cared nothing for the
response of readers to his poetry:
Our charge against Lord Byron is, that,
in a temper of restless and indecent
disdain, he presumes on his popularity
to become a downright scribbler.— trying
the public to what extent they will
receive what he does not think it worth
his while to prepare. He does not even
affect the slightest respect for the
public taste, or care for its
quality. . . . (46)
Byron's critics continually voiced such protests,
complaining that the aristocratic poet was completely
ignoring the potential effect of his works.
Nevertheless it is clear that Byron carefully
calculated just how far he could take his audience, and
he seems to have been driven by a strong rebellious
streak to push this limit as far as it could go.4
Some critics retained hope that it was in their power
to save Byron from himself, that he would listen to
them if they honored his genius while attempting to
correct its course. In the April 1818 number of the
Quarterly Review. Sir Walter Scott tried to advise his
friend in an insightful review of the fourth and final
152
canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This was a highly
charged period in the relationship between Byron and
his readers, after his marital problems became public
but before the furor over Don Juan, when a decisive
break would occur between Byron and his middle-class
readers and critics. It was a perfect time for Scott
to look back to the phenomenon of Byron's early fame,
trying to investigate the source of this controversial
poet's popularity and to suggest a way for critics to
respond to Byron when he violated their standards of
good taste.
According to Scott, it was Byron's innovative
genius that had both won him an audience and cost him
their regard, for he simultaneously satisfied some of
the demands of their taste while flouting others.
Taste, Scott argued, is more than a social brake on the
headlong rush of original genius; the public has a
taste for the rush of genius itself, for an originality
that—
as it is the highest and rarest property
of genius, is also that which has most
charms for the public. Not that
originality is always necessary, for the
world will be contented, in the poverty
of its mental resource, with mere
novelty or singularity, and must
therefore be enchanted with a work that
exhibits both qualities.
153
Scott argued that perceptive readers have little
difficulty in identifying the works of genius, for they
need only apply the test of originality by comparing an
author's work with the contemporary work of others.
Meanwhile, according to Scott, the "vulgar author" can
be discerned "by his treading, or attempting to tread,
in the steps of the reigning favourite of the day." If
readers, then, establish a familiarity with the works
being published in their day, they can easily separate
works of genius from those of mere imitators.
Scott sadly noted, however, that less widely-read
consumers can equally easily be fooled by aesthetic
imitators, for copies of works of genius may adversely
affect the popularity of the originals, which, if too
often imitated, no longer appear innovative:
The consequence is, not that the herd of
imitators gain their object, but that
the melody which they have profaned
becomes degraded in the sated ears of
the public— its original richness,
wildness and novelty are forgotten when
it is made manifest how easily the
leading notes can be caught and
parodied, and whatever its intrinsic
merit may have been, it becomes for the
time, stale and fulsome.
According to Scott, the only redress for much-imitated
original writers is the certainty that posterity will
"eventually revive and claim its proper place amid the
poetical galaxy"; though these works will no longer
154
possess the charms of novelty, they will at least "no
longer [be] overshaded and incumbered by the croud of
satellites now consigned to chaos and primaeval night"
(OR 19 [1818]: 216).
In this review, Scott deftly executed his own
variation of Wordsworth's myth of genius. Instead of
merely healing the public's sick taste for novelty, as
Wordsworth suggested, Scott argued that genius actually
satisfies that taste, prompting a crowd of imitators,
among whom the works of genius lose their clear
superior standing. In the end, however, for both
Wordsworth and Scott, fame eventually restores the
proper literary status to the works of genius.
Moreover, both Wordsworth and Scott recognized the risk
of genuine originality, as opposed to mere imitation of
that which is already popular. Scott wrote:
The true poet attempts the very reverse
of the imitator. He plunges into the
stream of public opinion even when its
tide is running strongest, crosses its
direction, and bears his crown of laurel
as Caesar did his imperial mantle,
triumphant above the waves. (216)
Wordsworth argued that original works of art may teach
the hearts and minds of readers to appreciate genuine
literature. Scott ascribed the effect of genius to the
powerful currents exerted by original works as they run
155
counter to the waves of public opinion. He had faith,
then, that—
Such a phenomenon seldom fails at first to
divide and at length to alter the reigning
taste of the period, and if the bold adventurer
has successfully buffeted the ebbing tide which
bore up his competitor, he soon has the benefit
of the flood in his own favour. (216-17)
Scott attributed Byron's great popularity to one
aesthetic innovation, the poet's deliberate reduction
of the distance between his own personality and his
characters:
since the time of Cowper he has been the
first poet who, either in his own
person, or covered by no very thick
disguise, has directly appeared before
the public, an actually living man
expressing his own sentiments, thoughts,
hopes and fears. Almost all the poets
of our day, who have possessed a
considerable portion of public
attention, are personally little known
to the reader, and can only be judged
from the passions and feelings assigned
by them to persons wholly fictitious.
In Byron's work, then, the veil separating author and
audience had been stripped away.5 According to Scott,
this act of genius ensured the poet's popularity, for
he gave his readers what no recent poet had given them,
the illusion, at least, of peering inside the poet's
own soul. Wordsworth had stripped away the
conventional diction and elevated subject matter that
separates common life from poetic representation.
156
Byron moved a step further inside the poet, actually
appearing to cast himself as his main character. He
offered his audience the disturbing yet powerful
artistic spectacle of his own emotional turmoil.
Scott argued that Byron's poems exerted a complex
power on his readers, satisfying their appetite for
originality, moving them with his poetic power, while
at the same time piquing their curiosity about himself:
Childe Harold appeared— we must not say
in the character of the author— but
certainly in that of a real existing
person, with whose feelings as such the
public were disposed to associate those
of Lord Byron. Whether the reader acted
right or otherwise in persisting to
neglect the shades of distinction which
the author endeavoured to point out
betwixt his pilgrim and himself, it is
certain that no little power over the
public attention was gained from their
being identified. (217)
Scott was making a careful distinction between the real
Byron and the literary persona that he dangled in front
of his readers. Yet he concluded that Byron's genius
was to offer his readers the illusion that the two were
identical. The poet seemed to paint a more intimate
self-portrait than his readers were accustomed to
receiving? even if Childe Harold was not "Lord Byron's
very self," he was "Lord Byron's picture, sketched by
Lord Byron himself, arrayed in a fancy dress, and
disguised perhaps by some extrinsic attributes, but
157
still bearing a sufficient resemblance to the original
to warrant the conclusion that we have drawn."
According to Scott, much of the intense emotional
reaction to the poem seemed to come from "the novelty
and pride which the public felt, upon being called as
it were into familiarity with a mind so powerful, and
invited to witness and partake of its deep emotions."
Even better, "the feelings themselves were of a
character which struck with awe those to whom the noble
pilgrim thus exposed the sanctuary of his bosom"
(217, 218). Readers were given, not so much the pomp
and circumstance of ceremonial poetry, but a glimpse
into the barrenness of that pomp for the poet himself.
They were left with the tantalizing awareness that they
were not the center of the bard's attention:
The reader felt as it were in the
presence of a superior being, when,
instead of his judgment being consulted,
his imagination excited or soothed, his
taste flattered or conciliated in order
to bespeak his applause, he was told, in
strains of the most sublime poetry, that
neither he, the courteous reader, nor
aught the earth had to shew, was worthy
the attention of the noble traveller.
Scott convincingly linked Byron's rhetorical power
to the poet's assumption of an arrogant disregard for
his readers. From Wordsworth’s outright assertion of
authorial power, Byron had moved toward a poetry that
seemed to ignore his readers, while inviting them to
158
witness the spectacle of his own self-communion.
According to Scott, this stroke of genius convinced
Byron's readers that anyone who appeared to need their
approval so little must be a great and independent
being, for "the mass of mankind . . . judge that to be
superior to humanity which can look down upon its
common habits, tastes, and pleasures" (219). Of
course, Byron's imposition of a self-portrait on his
readers would have failed if he had not also possessed
the power to make them want to participate in this new
kind of literary relationship:
But it was not merely to the novelty of
an author speaking in his own person,
and in a tone which arrogated a contempt
of all the ordinary pursuits of life,
that "Childe Harold" owed its extensive
popularity: these formed but the point
or sharp edge of the wedge by which the
work was enabled to insinuate its way
into that venerable block, the British
public. The high claims inferred at
once in the direct appeal to general
attention, and scorn of general feeling,
were supported by powers equal to such
pretensions. He who despised the world
intimated that he had the talents and
genius necessary to win it if he had
thought it worth while. (219-20)
Scott maintained that Byron somehow satisfied his
readers' hope that beneath the corrupted emotions of
his poetic hero-genius beat a redeemable human heart,
"glowing" at the center of his poem "like the intense
and concentrated alcohol, which remains one single but
159
burning drop in the centre of the ice which its more
watery particles have formed." Readers could "see in
the Pilgrim what nature designed him to be, and what,
in spite of bad metaphysics and worse politics, he may
yet be, a person whose high talents the wise and
virtuous may enjoy without a qualifying sigh or frown"
(220). While vicariously enjoying, then, the spectacle
of despairing and corrupted genius, they could hope for
a redemption by their own upright example. That is,
readers who were enticed by Byron's refusal to enter
into direct literary conversation with them were
nevertheless engaged in a literary transaction, one
that could exert as powerful a force on the poet as he
was exerting on them. Wordsworth had created a myth of
the poet as redeemer of society; Scott, in turn, argued
that Byron's enormous popularity had come from the
ordinary readers' belief that their middle-class
morality could redeem the poet from himself.
The critic's relationship with the poet in such
circumstances, according to Scott, should be to give
him an honest response to the whole of his apparent
self-portrait, good and bad;
For ourselves, amid the various
attendants on the triumph of genius, we
would far rather be the soldier who,
placing by the side of his general,
mixes, with military frankness, censure
amid his songs of praise, than the slave
in the chariot to flatter his vanity by
1 60
low adulation, or exasperate his feeling
by virulent invective. In entering our
protest therefore against the justice
and the moral tendency of that strain of
dissatisfaction and despondency, that
cold and sceptical philosophy which
clouds our prospects on earth, and
closes those beyond it, we willingly
render to this extraordinary poem the
full praise that genius in its happiest
efforts can demand from us. (22 0-21)
To give such an account of a poem must also involve the
critic’s willingness to delve into the poet's own
character and offer him advice on living. Scott gently
asserted that Byron could be improved if he connected
himself more harmoniously with society, for "nature,
when she created man a social being, gave him the
capacity of drawing that happiness from his relations
with the rest of his race, which he is doomed to seek
in vain in his own bosom" (229). Despite his
admiration for Byron's genius, Scott could not believe
that the poet had nothing to gain from his readers:
If the earth be a den of fools and
knaves, from whom the man of genius
differs by the more mercurial and
exalted character of his intellect, it
is natural that he should look down with
pitiless scorn on creatures so inferior.
But if, as we believe, each man, in his
own degree, possesses a portion of the
ethereal flame, however smothered by
unfavourable circumstances, it is or
should be enough to secure the most mean
from the scorn of genius as well as from
the oppression of power, and such being
the case, the relations which we hold
with society through all their
gradations are channels through which
161
the better affections of the loftiest
may, without degradations, extend
themselves to the lowest. (229)
Scott envisioned a literary world in which poetic
geniuses and their critics could enjoy an amicable
working partnership aimed at raising the "affections'*
of society. If even the lowest reader carries with him
some shadow of genius, some "portion of the ethereal
flame" that enables him to respond in a feeling way to
art, then a coalition of writers and critics might
instruct readers in the proper reactions to literature.
While Wordsworth painted the poet as the savior of
men's hearts and minds, Scott argued that such
salvation requires more than the unbridled genius of an
author. Ideally, writers and readers function as
colleagues in the continuing process of literary
transaction. Poets create a work of art; critics
should respond in an intelligent and sympathetic manner
to that work, assessing, among other things, its
originality and the poet's own genius; and writers then
have the opportunity of revising their texts or
composing new works that take the critic's response
into account, yet held true to their own authorial
gifts.
This idealized vision, however, presupposes a
literary community in which authors and their reviewers
can reach some common ground on the nature of poetic
162
genius and the standards of taste. But no such
unanimity prevailed in the Romantic Period, when waves
of innovative texts were sent out in hopes of
influencing public opinion and met an on-rushing
countercurrent of the reviews that analyzed and judged
new works, recommending judgments to the mass of
readers who would either purchase literary works or
ignore them. In the Romantic Period, genius became a
theoretical battlefield, as authors and their critics
disputed each other's self-proclaimed power over the
literary process. Just as the complex eighteenth-
century concept of genius had given Wordsworth and
Coleridge the theoretical elements they needed to
mythologize the power of the poet, the same word gave
Romantic critics a flexible rationale for establishing
themselves as the professional hero-makers of the
literary world. Reviewers often expressed a genuine
respect for the genius of the poets whose works they
were reviewing. Yet even the most respectful critic
had limits on the innovations he would tolerate, and
one constant implication running through Romantic
reviews published during the period was the claim that
there was no genius so great that critics could not
identify, evaluate, and direct it.
In his review of the fourth canto of Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage. Scott perceptively described the
163
changing relationship of Byron and his critical and
popular readers, who enjoyed feeling the effects of the
poet's genius and were riveted by the teasing glimpses
he offered of himself, yet were unwilling to allow him
carte blanche in promulgating iniquity. Since this
poet had courted public confusion between his creations
and himself, it was only to be expected that when Byron
the man fell from public favor, Byron the poet would
find it increasingly difficult to exercise his genius
over readers. The ongoing conflict between poets and
their critics in the Romantic Period would reach a
crisis following Byron's publication of the first two
cantos of Don Juan, which not only appeared to entice
his readers in the ways of profligacy and sin, but did
so in an unfamiliar satirical style that struck many of
the poet's most ardent admirers as a betrayal of the
poet's own gift of genius. Thus it was in the furor
over Don Juan that critics experienced their most acute
fear of the corrupting effect of genius.
164
NOTES
1. Byron used this metaphor to describe the editors of
the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. Francis
Jeffrey and William Gifford, whom he called "the
monarch-makers in poetry and prose" CBLJ 2: 322).
2. The general story of Byron's changing relationship
with his readers, from his meteoric rise to poetic fame
with Childe Harold to his subsequent fall from moral
and literary grace is told in Leslie A. Marchand,
Bvron: A Biography; Herman M. Ward, Bvron and the
Magazines. 1806-1824: Keith Walker, Byron's Readers;
and Jay A. Ward, The Critical Reputation of Bvron's Don
Juan in Britain.
3. Wordsworth was not the only Romantic author to be
accused by critics of bad taste. Coleridge was
informed by the Monthly Review that his "superior
genius" had been "corrupted and debased" by his
"execrable taste" (72 [1817]: 25). And the same
journal later wrote of Keats, "he is continually
shocking our ideas of poetical decorum, at the very
time when we are acknowledging the hand of genius" (92
[1820]: 305-06).
4. See Peter J. Manning's Bvron and His Fictions,
which argues that the poet's work can only be fully
understood when it is placed in the context of his
psychological tendencies.
5. Scott was not alone in commenting on the close
relationship between Byron and his heroes. In the
Eclectic Review. Josiah Conder wrote, "We question
whether any of Lord Byron's characters are strictly
fictitious; for whatever variation of costume is thrown
over them, and whatever are the circumstances of the
tale, it is still the same combination of morbid
feelings and phrensied passions, aggravated into
various degrees of guilt, which is personified in the
successive avatars of his Lordship's genius . . ."
(7 [1817]: 293).
165
CHAPTER 4
THE DON JUAN CRISIS
If any person should presume to assert
This story is not moral, first, I pray,
That they will not cry out before they're hurt,
Then that they'll read it o'er again, and
say,
(But, doubtless, nobody will be so pert)
That this is not a moral tale, though gay;
Besides in canto twelfth, I mean to show
The very place where wicked people go.
Byron, Don Juan
The appearance of first two cantos of Don Juan in
July of 1819 brought the tensions between Byron and his
critics and readers to the surface. The publication of
this poem was a significant symbolic act, both for
Byron and for the audience that had made him the most
popular poet of his era. They had come to expect from
him works that skirted the boundaries of British
morality, barely managing to remain on the side of
acceptable reading, and satisfying their appetite for
dark Romantic heroes, autobiographical hints of the
poet's unconventional life, and sublime literary style.
But Don Juan would represent Byron's decision to ignore
his readers' expectations, applying his considerable
166
literary powers toward winning them over to a style
that suited his current frame of mind.
After the poet’s decisive break with his wife and
departure from England, many readers must have disputed
Walter Scott's suggestion that it was still possible
for them to redeem the wicked Lord through the medium
of their literary relationship. Yet Byron's behavior
might not have damaged his literary reputation had it
not been joined with an equally appalling set of
aesthetic sins. After all, the rumors of his sexual
depravity could have come as no surprise to any reader
who already associated the poet with his secretive
heroes. Much more damaging was Byron's refusal in Don
Juan to fulfill his readers' literary expectations. He
had experimented with satire since school days;
however, his most popular works were written in the
sublime style that had made him famous. From the first
cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) through
Manfred (1817), Byron's sublimity seems to have so
intoxicated British readers that they were generally
willing to tolerate the poetic evidence of his
unorthodox views. Moreover, his unconventional
attitudes appeared to have made reading his poems a
vicariously thrilling and intense experience, as long
as he expressed these attitudes in an elevated style.
167
But with the publication of Beppo in 1818 and Don
Juan in 1819, Byron returned to satire, declaring
independence from his audience's expectations. By
unleashing the powerful satire of Don Juan on Britain,
Byron provoked a crisis in his relationship with
readers and critics, as he pushed the limits of
authorial power they were willing to grant his genius.
Despite the absence of his name from the title page,
Byron's critics found him everywhere in this poem. And
they accurately judged Don Juan to be a literary weapon
aimed at subduing his readers. Not only had the poet
produced a work that seemed calculated to exceed his
earlier offenses against British moral sensibilities;
he had also couched that moral offense in an unexpected
mixture of styles. Whatever his readers had
anticipated they would encounter in this poem, they
quickly discovered that they were expected to accompany
Byron on a fast-paced literary ride that would take
them from sublimity to vulgarity, from pathos to satire
and back again. Most critics were agreed that Byron
had finally crossed the line between exerting the power
of his original genius and attempting to seduce his
readers to join him in an orgy of mental debauchery.
Many twentieth-century scholars have interpreted
the furor over Don Juan as evidence that Byron and his
critics fundamentally misunderstood one another. Some,
168
including E. D. H. Johnson, have ascribed a greater
part of the blame to the poet himself, arguing that the
exiled Byron was out of touch with the increasingly
stringent religious and moral code of England. Others
blame the critics, agreeing with Paul Trueblood that
"contemporary reviewers failed to regard Don Juan in
the spirit in which it was written" (84) . Keith Walker
maintains that the British failure to appreciate Byron
was so damaging that his "career as a serious poet
dated from 1816," after exile divorced him from a
nation that could not understand his poetic powers:
"He had rejected England, his public had rejected him.
Like The Giaour, Conrad, Lara and Alp, he was estranged
from his native land. Now he was free to pursue the
bent of his genius" (37).
Despite this assumption that Byron and his readers
were suffering from a critical miscommunication, the
poet's letters and the earliest reviews of Don Juan
strongly indicate that they understood one another well
enough.1 Both parties undoubtedly recognized the
dispute over this poem as a power struggle to control
the course of their literary relationship. By 1818
that relationship had degenerated into ambivalence and
distrust on both sides. Up to this time some measure
of common ground had allowed author and audience to
collaborate in literary transactions, and Byron had
169
created original texts that both moved and mildly
offended his readers, generally satisfying their
literary expectations of him. The reviewers of these
earlier poems, meanwhile, had set forth their
appreciation of his genius, coupled with admonitions
that he bring it into closer conformity with
conventional morals. However, with the publication of
Don Juan the accord between poet and critics so
disintegrated that both sides seized the opportunity of
this literary event to attack one another and, if
possible, to force the reinstatement of agreement on
their own terms.
The Evidence of Bvron's Letters
While Byron was negotiating with his friends in
England to arrange the publication of Don Juan, he sent
them a series of letters that document his antagonism
toward his public, who had, he felt, unfairly cast him
aside. These letters suggest that he was using Don
Juan as a three-pronged offensive on British society.
To modern critics, the most obvious line of his attack
is the direct satirical assault launched on Byron's
British enemies and the prudish society that had
scorned him. Equally obvious, however, to early
170
readers was a subtler poetic assault on their literary
reactions and sensibilities. From the first reviews of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, his critics had frequently
commented on the power of his genius, despite the flaws
that were attached to his powerful originality. Now
Byron himself repeatedly insisted to his friends that
Don Juan would succeed if it was clever, implying that
the sheer power of his genius and wit would sweep his
readers along with him in spite of themselves (BLJ 6:
94-95, 104, 105).
In addition, failing the outright success of the
first two lines of Byron's direct and indirect assaults
on British society, which would have been manifested in
large sales and in critical acclaim, the embattled
Byron was ready to claim for himself a moral victory
merely in the personal satisfaction of shocking and
provoking his British readers. Thus his campaign
strategy was foolproof. Either he would win his moral
battle with Britain directly or indirectly through the
persuasive powers of his work, or he would proclaim
himself the victor in his own eyes regardless of the
outcome of the battle.
In this confrontation between author and audience,
Byron had the distinct advantage of coding his
assertions of power in verse so that he could deny,
even in his private letters, their very existence. In
171
fact., the letters to Byron's London literary circle
were themselves to become coded maneuvers in his
campaign to get an unexpurgated Don Juan into print at
all costs. These letters followed no clearly defined
pattern of argumentation. Instead, Byron fired an
assortment of arguments and justifications at his
friends, never abandoning any line of reasoning
permanently despite the emergence of new and often
contradictory rationales.
Throughout, however, the letters reveal Byron's
ambivalence toward his audience, including his need of
another successful and profitable poem and his proud
and belligerent unwillingness to fashion this new
project to suit his audience. According to a letter
Byron wrote to Moore on September 19, 1818, the initial
impetus for Don Juan was the popularity of Beppo; "I
have finished the First Canto . . . of a poem in the
style and manner of 'Beppo,1 encouraged by the good
success of the same." He added, "It is called 'Don
Juan,' and is meant to be a little quietly facetious
upon every thing" (BLJ 6: 67). Since even at this
early period Byron's new poem was obviously more than
"a little quietly facetious," he was indulging in an
understatement about its indecencies and at the same
time softening their impact on his friends. Byron even
admitted in this letter to Moore his own doubts that
172
the public could accept this new poem: "I doubt
whether it is not— at least, as far as it has yet
gone— too free for these very modest days. However, I
shall try the experiment, anonymously, and if it don't
take, it will be discontinued" (BLJ 6: 67-68).
Already, then, despite E. D. H. Johnson's argument
that Byron was out of touch with the moral climate in
Britain, he was at least partially aware of the changes
in "these very modest days," and he was unsure whether
he could gain public approval of his poem.
Nevertheless, he vaguely hinted that he would somehow
be able to fit the "facetiousness" of the first canto
("at least— as far as it has yet gone") into a morally
acceptable framework later in the poem. He had also
already in mind a publication strategy for Don Juan, to
try it as an anonymous experiment that would be
continued only upon public approval. Wordsworth
suggested in his advertisement that Lyrical Ballads was
an experiment in verse, yet proved to be unwilling to
accept any negative criticism as evidence of
experimental failure. Similarly, Byron was both
acutely aware of the importance of a positive response
to Don Juan and unwaveringly sure that this was the
kind of work he wanted to write. Still, for Murray to
print future cantos of this poem, Byron well knew that
he would have to win audience approval by the
173
cleverness and power of his poetry. Failing that, he
could always gloat in having at least succeeded in
shocking them. However, his initial task was merely to
convince his friends to let him try.
By November 11 Byron was writing to Hobhouse that
he had sent the revised first canto of Don Juan to
England, along with Mazeppa and the "Ode on Venice,"
and he asked Hobhouse "to read— & having read— and if
possible approved to obtain the largest or (if large be
undeserved— ) the fairest price from [Murray] or any
one else" for the works. At this time Byron could be
sure neither of the reception his new works,
particularly Don Juan, would receive in England, nor of
their fair market value. Therefore, he authorized
Hobhouse to obtain some other opinions: "you can
consult Douglas K[innaird] about the price thereof and
your own Judgment— & whose else you like about their
merits." He also tried to prepare Hobhouse for the
licenses of Don Juan and to disarm in advance the
protests he feared he would receive:
As one of the poems is as free as La
Fontaine— & bitter in politics— too— the
Damned Cant and Toryism of the day may
make Murray pause— in that case you will
take any Bookseller who bids best;— When
I say free— I mean that freedom— which
Ariosto Boiardo and Voltaire— Pulci—
Berni— all the best Italian & French— as
well as Pope & Prior amongst the English
permitted themselves;— but no improper
174
words nor phrases— merely some
situations— which are taken from life.
Byron added, rather optimistically, "However you will
see to all this— when the M. S. S. arrive" (BLJ
6: 76-77). Nevertheless, the brazenness of this
premature defense suggests that he expected his London
friends to find in Don Juan not only "improper words"
but also some situations too close to life to make for
respectable fiction.
To prepare his friends to accept Don Juan as a
reasonable literary venture, Byron placed its seeming
improprieties in the context of the licenses take by
other artistic geniuses in the past: La Fontaine,
Ariosto, Boiardo, Voltaire, Pulci, Berni, Pope, and
Prior. Though he would have detested any suggestion
that he was following in Wordsworth's footsteps, the
strategies of these two revolutionary poets bear a
striking similarity. As the older poet had done
eighteen years before in the Preface, Byron was linking
himself to a select group of literary predecessors,
hoping to convince others to judge his work by his own
standards rather than by the conventions he was
breaking.
Though Byron was evidently in some anxiety about
the reaction in London to Don Juan, he could not have
known that Hobhouse would take him at his word,
175
circulating the manuscript among the London literary
circle, not to give Byron a poetic or financial
appraisal, but to present a united opposition to
publication on the grounds of the poem's manifest
improprieties. Hobhouse had read the manuscripts the
day after he received them, as he recorded in his diary
on December 27:
I have my doubts about Don Juan; the
blasphemy and bawdry and the domestic
facts overpower even the great genius it
displays. Of Mazeppa and the "Ode" [on
Venice], I do not think much. Murray
called and wanted to advertise at once.
I told him I was not sure about the
publications. (Critical Heritage 157)
After reading the manuscript of Don Juan. Frere and
Kinnaird agreed; as January drew to a close, so did
Murray, Scrope Davies, and Tom Moore (Steffan 17).
Even before, by the middle of January, Hobhouse had
already informed Byron of the early consensus of his
friends that Don Juan was unsuitable for publication.
On January 19, Byron wrote a letter to Hobhouse
and Kinnaird, strengthening the defense of Don Juan
that he had tentatively proffered in his earlier letter
and refusing to authorize heavy editing of the poem for
the sake of public acceptance;
With regard to the Poeshie— I will have
no "cutting & slashing" as Perry calls
it— you may omit the stanzas on
Castlereagh— indeed it is better— & the
176
two "Bobs1 1 at the end of the 3rd stanza
of the dedication— which will leave
"high" & "adry" good rhymes without any
"double (or Single) Entendre"— but no
more— I appeal to Murray at his ledger—
to the people— in short, Don Juan shall
be an entire horse or none.— If the
objection be to the indecency, the Age
which applauds the "Bath Guide" &
Little's poems— & reads Fielding &
Smollett still— may bear with that;— if
to the poetry— I will take my chance.
(BLJ 6: 91)
Again Byron was excusing his tacitly admitted
"indecency" on the grounds of literary precedent,
expecting, or professing to expect, that an experienced
literary public ought to do the same. The quality of
his poetry, he implied, could speak for itself.
Possibly he may have been unaware of the full extent to
which the moral climate of Britain was changing. But,
in view of his September letter to Moore, it is far
likelier that he was perfectly aware of those changes
and had, indeed, planned Don Juan as an attack on the
hypocritical stringency of British morals, but was
unwilling to admit as much to Hobhouse and Kinnaird.
Certainly he seemed bent on publishing "an entire
horse" no matter what the cost in Murray's profits or
in public opinion might be:
I will not give way to all the Cant of
Christendom— I have been cloyed with
applause & sickened with abuse;— at
present— I care for little but the
Copyright,— I have imbibed a great love
for money— let me have it— if Murray
177
loses this time— he won't the next— he
will be cautious— and I shall learn the
decline of his customers by his
epistolary indications. But in no
case will I submit to have the poem
mutilated. (BU 6: 91)
Determined to extract his copyright fee from
Murray, Byron was callously aware that if Don Juan
failed, its author would already have been paid, so
that it was the publisher who stood to lose most from a
literary disaster. He also knew that his reputation
was already at low ebb. With little to lose,
therefore, with confidence in his poetry and a
reasonable justification for his "indecency," and with
the prospect of sweet literary revenge against his
accusers and the "Cant of Christendom," Byron was
standing firm against the "cutting & slashing" that
could have emasculated Don Juan into a socially
acceptable poem.
From the beginning, then, Byron had mixed feelings
and expectations about Don Juan. He knew that it was
good; he also knew that it had vast potential to
offend. He hoped to be able to bring his readers to
laugh with him, making the poem a huge financial
success and enlisting the participation of his audience
in his satirical attacks against their own society and
Byron's enemies therein. Even if the poem failed,
however, Byron was determined to see it and all of its
178
offensive attacks in print. He seemed both to want to
please his readers (or rather to make them be pleased
in spite of themselves), while at the same time he
relished the prospect of offending them. As Scott
noted, Byron's power lay in his denial of his audience.
And, like Wordsworth, he determined to use his genius
to create an audience for the kind of poetry he wanted
to write.
Byron's determination to see Don Juan "an entire
horse or none" was even to win out briefly over his
open eagerness to make money from this work. The day
after writing to Hobhouse and Kinnaird, Byron wrote
Murray authorizing a few deletions, justifying the rest
of the poem, and suggesting the possibility of a small-
scale private printing: "If published— publish
entire— with the above mentioned exceptions— or you may
publish anonymously— or not at all— in the latter event
print 50 on my account for private distribution"
(BLJ 6: 94). In the face of continued opposition from
London, Byron wrote to Murray on the twenty-fifth
definitely settling on private publication:
You will do me the favour to print
privately— (for private distribution— )
fifty copies of Don Juan— the list of
the men to whom I wish it to be
presented I will send hereafter. . . .
Print Don Juan entire omitting of course
the lines on Castlereagh as I am not on
the spot to meet him.
179
Byron was not, however, content with this
compromise between his desire to publish "an entire
horse" and his friends' fears about a public outcry:
I have acquiesced in the request— &
representation— & having done so— it is
idle to detail my arguments in favour of
my own Self-love & "Poeshie;" but I
protest. If the poem has poetry— it
would stand— if not— fall— the rest is
"leather and prunella,"— and has never
yet affected any human production "pro
or con."— Dullness is the only
annihilator in such cases. CBLJ 6:
94-95)
In this passage Byron was presenting to Murray a theory
of the relationship between poet and public that is
highly suggestive of his own motives in writing and
publishing Don Juan. According to Byron, the
controlling factor of a literary relationship is the
quality of the poetry itself, and all "the rest"—
including judgments of a poem's moral worth— has in the
final analysis no effect on the success of a poem.
That is, if the poet is clever and skillful enough, he
can force acceptance, or at least grudging tolerance,
of outlandish or even offensive texts; if, however, he
is dull, he loses control of his audience, and
extraneous judgments may enter into play.
Byron was, in effect, attempting to reassert
control over the definition of his own genius. His
readers had already demonstrated great tolerance of his
180
improprieties as long as they were couched in the
familiar sublime style presumed to be the source of his
poetic power. Now he was declaring himself a satirical
genius, skilled enough to dominate even the most
antagonistic of readers. He could not have predicted,
however, the tenacity with which his critics would
continue to insist that his real genius was sublime
rather than satirical. Byron had become so identified
with sublimity and sublimity with his poetry that his
own body of work now imprisoned him in a rigid set of
reader expectations. Having delighted the public with
the originality of Childe Harold. Byron found it
difficult to move readers to accept another style that
seemed both unfamiliar and uncongenial to their taste.
In the "Essay Supplementary" Wordsworth had
comforted himself with his faith that, over time,
genius would win out over opposition, and he came to a
grudging admission that readers must cooperate in
literary transactions instead of expecting to submit
passively to authors (414, 428). Byron, however, still
hoped that he could use his genius to speed up the
eventual judgment of posterity. In the months to come,
he was to call on this theory again and again to
justify to his friends his intermittent optimism about
the success of Don Juan, despite the difficulties it
would undoubtedly face in pleasing the upstanding
British reading public.
By February 1, Byron was rallying, writing to
Murray in a conspiratorial tone suggesting that the two
of them unite to push for general publication in
opposition to the rest: "I have written to you several
letters— some with additions— & some upon the subject
of the poem itself which my cursed puritanical
committee have protested against publishing— but we
will circumvent them on that point in the end.1 1 Though
still talking of a private printing, Byron apparently
saw the distribution of fifty copies as but one step
toward full public distribution. His resolve to
achieve general publication was strengthened by his
friends' inability to complain of the quality of his
poem: "If they had told me the poetry was bad— I would
have acquiesced— but they say the contrary— & then talk
to me about morality." After all, according to the
theory Byron had already expounded to Murray, in the
success of a poem, poetry counted— morals did not. And
anyway, he added, "I maintain that it is the most moral
of poems— but if people don't discover the moral that
is their fault not mine" (BLJ 6: 99).
Thus, in one clever maneuver, Byron was both
claiming responsibility for the poetic genius of Don
Juan, which even his critics were generally to admit,
182
and absolving himself of responsibility for its
perceived morality or immorality. Morality, he could
now claim, was in the mind of the reader, hence out of
the poet's jurisdiction and power. Whereas before in
his letters he had admitted the "indecency" of Don Juan
and openly feared that it might be "too free," now
Byron was able to exploit the elastic connotations of
these highly subjective terms to claim that there was
no indecency, no immorality, no indelicacy, in spite of
the fact that others might not agree. He was, in
effect, hedging his bets. If he succeeded in making
his readers like Don Juan, he would have won outright
the power struggle between poet and reader. And if Don
Juan was a failure because of its indelicacy, he could
complacently maintain that any indelicacy lay in the
indelicate minds of his audience.
On February 22 Byron wrote to Kinnaird to insist
on public distribution, and he used these verbal
tactics once more to refuse to accept responsibility
for his improprieties:
Tell Hobhouse that "Don Juan" must be
published— the loss of the copyright
would break my heart— all that he says
may be very fine & very true— but my
"regard for my fee" is the ruling
passion and I must have it.— I have
written to let him omit the two "bobs"
high & Dry and I think all the rest very
decent. (BLJ 6: 100)
183
Throughout the months to follow Byron continued to
alternate between the conflicting strategies he had
already developed to see Don Juan in print. On March 6
he wrote Kinnaird to admit the furor they all saw
coming, to reiterate his trust in the quality of the
poem, and to claim once more both his right to his fee
and his freedom from public control:
Your opinion & that of the others is I
dare say quite right— & that there will
be a war of' Criticism & Methodism in
consequence— but "I have supped full of
horrors" and it must be a "dismal
treatise" that will make my "fell of
hair stir & move" nowadays.— The poem
has merit you all say— very well— leave
the rest to the chances— and recollect
that nothing would console me for the
omission of the monies. . . . Don't
answer me with any more damned
preachments from Hobhouse— about public
opinion— I never flattered that & I
never will— & when the public leaves off
reading what I write— the booksellers
will tell us— & then I shall respect it
more than ever I did yet— though I would
not change a word to regain it even
then— unless it had my own approbation.
(BLJ 6: 101)
The common thread in all this complicated texture
of an explanation is Byron's assertion of his own power
in the face of opposition. He was Byron the humble but
meritorious poet; Byron the oppressed but independent
fighter; Byron the successful but superior purveyor to
public consumption. He had the right, according to
this self-portrait, to both the rewards and the trials
184
of embattled heroic genius. Like Wordsworth he would
take resistance as proof of his originality. Moreover,
since unlike Wordsworth he had come to expect brisk
popular sales, Byron professed a remarkable contempt
for the audience that continued to purchase works they
believed to be immoral. He was, that is, creating his
own version of the genius myth, developed through his
tumultuous relationship with readers. Instead of
accepting Coleridge's view that poetic isolation was
the proper realm for genius, or even Wordsworth's
grudging willingness to wait for posterity, Byron
envisioned the genius at war in the world,
contemptuously forcing readers to submit to his power.
Regardless of the outcome of this literary war, Byron
implied that he had earned any fee that would be given
him up front, for he was providing the spectacle of
heroic conflict that readers paid to witness in his
works. He insisted that, while he deserved the respect
of the discerning few, he welcomed the glory of a fight
with the undiscerning multitude and the fee those
readers would pay for the privilege. Once again, Byron
had skillfully set up terms under which even the
critical failure of Don Juan could be construed as a
vindication of its author.
However, Byron also continued sporadically to
reiterate his optimism that in spite of the gathering
1 85
battle, his artistic mastery could ensure the success
of Don Juan. On April 3 he wrote to Murray, "If the
poem is, or appears, dull, it will fail; if not, it
will succeed" (BLJ 6: 104). He wrote Murray again on
April 7 that "The poem will please if it is lively— if
it is stupid it will fail" (BLJ 6: 105). Yet, balanced
against this occasional optimism was Byron's growing
eagerness for a mighty war with the British public. He
told Murray, "I will battle my way against them, all—
like a Porcupine." The public had lionized him and
then used him ill; this was, he informed Murray, his
opportunity to show them how little he cared for their
good opinion:
I know the precise worth of popular
applause— for few Scribblers have had
more of it— and if I chose to swerve
into their paths— I could retain it or
resume it— or increase it— but I neither
love ye— nor fear ye— and though I buy
with ye— and sell with ye— and talk with
ye— I will neither eat with ye— drink
with ye— nor pray with ye.— They made me
without my search a species of popular
Idol— they— without reason or judgement
beyond the caprice of their Good
pleasure— threw down the Image from it's
pedestal— it was not broken with the
fall— and they would it seems again
replace it— but they shall not.
(BLJ 6: 106)
Byron seemed determined to resist popular reinstatement
except on his own terms, spurning the idolatry of the
public unless he could make them replace their old
1 8 6
sublime image of him with an appreciation of his new
satirical style.
While Byron was alternating between optimism about
Don Juan's success and an eagerness for moral combat,
his friends continued to plead with him to consider the
risks he was taking. Yet with so tempting an
opportunity for vengeance before Byron and with the
possibility of outright victory and a complete success,
those pleas continued to fall on deaf ears. Byron told
Kinnaird on April 7:
As for the "Don Juan" you may talk till
you are hoarse— I sent the second Canto
& will have both published— all for the
fee— what care I for the "public
attunement" did I ever flatter the
rascals?— never & I never will— let them
like or not. (BLJ 6: 109)
He seemed to welcome the battle he was facing and wrote
to Murray on May 6:
Methinks I see you with a long face
about "Don Juan" anticipating the
outcry— and the Scalping reviews that
will ensue;— all that is my affair— do
you think I do not foresee all this as
well as you?— Why— Man— it will be Nuts
to all of them,— they never had such an
opportunity of being terrible;— but dont
you be out of sorts. . . . I shall have
my hands full. (BLJ 6: 123)
As Don Juan moved closer to publication, Byron
also continued blithely to assert that the supposed
immorality of Don Juan lay in the minds of its readers,
187
while his own mind was pure. On May 15 he wrote to
Murray:
Mr. Hobhouse is at it again about
indelicacy— there is no indelicacy— if
he wants that. let him read Swift— his
great Idol— but his Imagination must be
a dunghill with a Viper's nest in the
middle— to engender such a supposition
about this poem.— For my part I think
you are all crazed. (BU 6: 125)
Similarly, he insisted to Hobhouse on May 17 that the
poem contained no attacks on Lady Byron, and even if it
did, they were well deserved:
What are you so anxious about Donna Inez
for? She is not meant for
Clytemnestra— and if She were— would you
protect the fiend. . . . What— is a
ludicrous character of a tiresome woman
in a burlesque poem to be suppressed or
altered because a contemptible and
hypocritical wretch may be supposed to
pointed at? (BLJ 6: 131)
On May 2 0 Byron again proved his willingness to
compromise his fee if necessary to get a complete Don
Juan into print. He suggested to Kinnaird that the fee
might be made wholly contingent on the success of Don
Juan:
You may tell H. and M. and all— that I
will alter nothing more than I have
altered— that I neither care whether
they like the poetry— or no— I think it
good— but have no sanguine ideas of it's
success— and have no objections to make
Murray's treaty conditional— receiving
nothing in case of nothing being
received— and so on in proportion.
188
Byron added that he was still ready for the coming war:
I know that I shall have your Quarterly and
your Edinburgh too about my ears— and all your
reading world— and your writing other world; be
it so— if I am in Spirits next winter I'll
answer them— and if I am not— I shall have the
best of it without. (BU 6: 137)
He would "have the best of it" because he had set
himself up to win this power struggle, at least in his
own eyes, no matter what the public reaction to Don
Juan might be. If he succeeded in pleasing his
readers, he would have won them over on his own terms.
And if he merely succeeded in offending them, he would
have the satisfaction of taking a heroic stance and
making a highly public assault on his enemies and on
the British moral code. He could even claim the
perverse pleasure of pretending to place the blame for
finding offense in this poem squarely on the shoulders
of the offended.
Byron's letters document his eagerness to attack
the accepted moral code of society, suggesting that his
apparent obtuseness about the improprieties of Don Juan
sprang not from a misunderstanding of that code but
instead from a determination to transmit in toto a
complex verbal attack on the society that had cast him
out. By attacking that society, Byron was forcing a
189
confrontation with his readers, one that was designed
to test their power against his.
The Earlv Reviews
Byron and his critics may have disagreed about the
morality of Don Juan, but they were nevertheless in
perfect agreement that the crucial issue at stake in
this controversy was the balance of power between the
poet and his readers. The earliest reviews of Don
Juan. therefore, explicitly recognized the poet's
demonstrations of authorial power and countered them by
refusing to submit to Byron's assaults and artistic
manipulations. Many of the contemporary reviews,
indeed, stand as testimonials to the great amount of
conscious effort these early readers felt was necessary
to prevent themselves from falling completely under the
spell of Don Juan. Thus most early reviews, both
favorable and hostile, strike the modern reader as a
strange mixture of sincere and warm appreciation of
Byron's poetic genius, combined with equally sincere
and even warmer castigation of his moral lapses.
Four such mixed reviews appeared in British
journals in July and August of 1819, just after the
publication of Don Juan, ranging from a highly
190
approving review in the Literary Gazette to a highly
disapproving one in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,
with the reviews in the Eclectic Review and Monthly
Review lying somewhere between the two extremes of
approval or disapproval. Despite this wide range of
opinion, however, all four of these early reviews used
a similar critical strategy, arguing that the genius of
Byron1s Don Juan went hand in hand with its obvious
defects. To counter Byron's poetic assault, these
reviewers offered their own variations of the Romantic
myth of genius, claiming that it was the critic's right
to weigh the relative flaws and genius in a work,
judging its worth by the relative proportion of its
strengths and weaknesses. All four critics strongly
implied that they would have been foolhardy to let
geniuses like Byron set the standards by which they
should be judged. Two of the reviewers were willing to
tolerate the flaws that were associated with Byron's
genius; the other two argued that his genius could no
longer sustain the weight of the human flaws, or
rather, the almost inhuman degradation with which he
had encumbered it.
In either case, these reviewers clearly understood
the poet's privately-stated motivations, for they
described Byron's genius as a kind of mastery in the
art of subduing readers to his aesthetic will.
191
Depending on their predictions about the consequences
of submitting to such rhetorical dominance, these
critics advocated varying degrees of resistance to the
power exerted by the poem on its readers. For example,
in two consecutive issues appearing on July 17 and 24,
1819, the Literary Gazette presented a strong minority
opinion arguing in favor of the new poem that had just
appeared. On the seventeenth, the Gazette reviewed the
first canto of Don Juan, judging the poem to be a
"witty if a little licentious, and delightful if not
very moral production," so that "even when we blame the
too great laxity of the poet, we cannot but feel a high
admiration of his talent." Therefore, despite the
Gazette's disapproval of Byron's "flings at religion"
and his "prurient imagination ill repressed," this
review concluded with a recommendation of the poem to
its readers: "Though we cannot approve of every part,
we have been much delighted with the whole" (17 July
1819: 449-51).
It is in the second of the two Gazette reviews,
however, that the Gazette explicitly noted the poet's
powerful genius and his efforts to control his readers'
reactions:
There appears to us, to be more of
powerful and genuine poetry in this than
in the first Canto. It is equally
voluptuous towards the conclusion; but
in painting the strife of the elements,
192
and the agonies of famine driven by
despair to cannibalism, the author puts
forth his genius and commands our souls.
(24 July 1819: 470)
If the Gazette found more to command the reader's soul
in the second canto, it also found much to deplore in
this "very mixed production" (472) . Through both the
flaws and the genius, however, the Gazette found the
imprint of Byron's own personality. This reading of
Don Juan, then, amounted to a personal confrontation
with the poet himself:
[T]he great objection to Don Juan must
be felt to be its licentiousness. It is
lamentable to think that the author has
fallen so deeply into this error: in
ribaldry, he is exceeded, and in
drollery, (though he is often
exceedingly amusing), surpassed by many
writers who have had their day and sunk
into oblivion; but in highly-wrought
interest, and overwhelming passion, he
is himself alone. Here is the basis of
his fame, and we could wish that the
structure stood uncontaminated with that
levity and pruriency which the less
scrupulous may laugh at to-day, but
which has no claim to the applause of
judicious or moral contemporaries, or of
impartial posterity. (473)
The Gazette argued that Byron's genius was
characterized by his sublimity or "overwhelming
passion" and that it was this passionate power that
would ensure his poetic immortality and enable him to
gain the approval of his contemporaries. According to
this review, Don Juan was an admirable achievement
193
because it carried so completely the personal imprint
of Byron's fervent genius; but it was also
objectionable in that it likewise carried the imprint
of his wickedness. In both genius and moral license,
however, Don Juan was Byron's own. The Gazette
concluded that to read the poem was necessarily to
judge the poet's own life as well, since the very
nature of Byron's genius allowed him to reach through
the text and exercise his power on an audience. The
poet had made himself fair game for criticism when he
forced himself on readers through the medium of his
poem.
The Literary Gazette recommended Don Juan on the
grounds that its flaws did not outweigh its genius.
Similarly, the Monthly Review of July, 1819, also
recommended the poem to its readers, though with a few
more reservations about Byron's moral and aesthetic
lapses. This journal began its combined response to
Mazeppa and Don Juan by insisting that it was only to
be expected that the virtues of Byron's work were
inextricably linked with his poetic sins. According to
this review, most ordinary genius is partial and
limited to a single sphere of artistic excellence;
great genius, however, like Byron's, is complete and
universal in its excellence, though often coupled with
equally great faults:
194
When . . . a genius arises which appears
to unite in itself many of these
opposite characteristics of the
imitative powers, it must surely be
drawn from the fountains of nature
herself, must be highly original, and
must become deservedly popular: Yet,
which may appear paradoxical, but is
nevertheless true, it is frequently born
possessed of faults almost as numerous
as its beauties. (89 [1819]: 310)
The Monthly Review described Byron as a contemporary
example of the "master-spirits in the strange history
of mind," one of the—
musicians of nature, who, confined to no
key, run through the whole scale of
harmony from the lowest to the highest
note; exhibiting the sublime or the
trifling, the witty or the impassioned,
the elegant or the impetuous, as the
Proteus-god prevails. (310)
The versatility of these master-poets, then, was
presumably the basis of their genius; proof of Byron's
genius was the fact that he was "superior in
versatility of thought and numbers to any single poet"
of the day (311).
The Literary Gazette described Byron as possessing
a peculiar genius for sublime passion; the Monthly
Review, however, characterized his genius as virtuoso
versatility, capable of inhabiting many emotions and
expressing itself in many styles. According to this
reviewer, such versatility left great geniuses like
Byron susceptible to being tempted from the path of
195
safe conventionality: "His strength often swells into
turgidity; his descriptions and characters are rather
exaggerated; he aims at expressing more than the
subject will bear; and his feelings betray him into
tautology and egotism." Even worse, Byron was prone to
intellectual and moral flaws as well as poetic ones:
While his sentiments are peculiar, and
often false, his philosophical
observations become obscure; and his
restlessness of feeling often breaks
through the connection of his thoughts,
to surprize us with comparisons neither
agreeable nor true. He is the real poet
of passion: but he describes passion of
an untamed nature, which recoils with
increasing force from every weight that
is laid on it. He is likewise too fond
of anatomizing, and unfolding to our
view, the inclinations rather than the
duties or the finer action of our
nature. (311)
This balance in theory between genius and its
flaws, between appreciation of Byron's versatility and
disapproval of his poetic, intellectual, and moral
sins, allowed the Monthly Review to express a somewhat
puzzled, disapproving appreciation for Don Juan, which
it called a "singular and very superior poem"—
a poem, however, which has also such
demerits, that neither his Lordship nor
his usual publisher has chosen to
acknowledge it: but which, if
originality and variety be the surest
test of genius, has certainly the
highest title to it. . . . (314)
196
Moreover, this reviewer offered two explanations for
Byron's puzzling contradictions, ascribing them both to
his versatile genius, which enabled him to shift easily
from one emotion to another, and to his own conflicted
mental state. For the Monthly Review, like the
Literary Gazette, glimpsed the man behind the poem,
clearly discerning his efforts to assert control over
his readers: "We might almost imagine that the
ambition had seized the author to please and to
displease the world at the same time" (314). To his
contemporaries, Byron himself was the key to this
enigmatic poem: it was his genius that inspired it,
his flaws that marred it, and his purposes that made it
profoundly confusing to its readers.
But the Monthly Review expressed no fear that Don
Juan would overwhelm Byron's audience, suggesting the
their relationship had always been one of literary
equality, in which the readers were free to approve and
disapprove of Byron at the same time. "We hope,"
concluded this reviewer, "that his readers have learnt
to admire his genius without being in danger from its
influence; and we must not be surprized if a poet will
not always write to instruct as well as to please us"
(315). The avowed purpose of this critic was to
facilitate the relationship of poet and public, helping
Byron's readers sort out the admirable from the
197
deplorable, "endeavoring . . . like artful chemists, to
extract an essence from the mass, which, resembling the
honey from poisonous flowers, may yet be sweet and
pure" (315).
According to the Monthly Review. Don Juan’s first
readers found themselves in possession of all the
elements in the complicated chemical "mass" of the
poem— the honey of Byron's genius, the poisonous flaws
from which that honey must be extracted, and the poet's
obvious gleeful attachment to his poem. The readers'
task, therefore, was to select from this mass the
particular aesthetic gifts that they were willing to
accept from Byron's hand. To put it another way, the
Monthly Review argued that readers could either follow
Byron in his personal journey through this poem or, at
times, stand back in condemnation or amusement as Byron
went on alone. The poet's genius lay in his persuasive
ability to draw the reader along with him, often
reluctantly, for much of the way. But the reader's
moral and aesthetic duty was to evade Byron's power
whenever the poet attempted to lead his audience onto
forbidden paths:
Voluptuous ... as is his delineation
of the delight which the sex confer on
us in this world, and powerful as are
the varied attractions of his pen, it
requires some exertion to withdraw
ourselves from his spell, and to bestow
merited censure on all the abuses which
198
he commits both as a painter and as a
writer. (321)
To read Don Juan correctly, therefore, was to
resist where necessary the impressive power of the
author to draw the reader along forbidden paths. This
implies that ideally the reader is not enslaved by the
genius of an author but instead shares responsibility
for shaping the artistic experience. The issue of
audience autonomy exasperated Wordsworth, forcing him
to conclude that the reader must "exert himself" for he
"cannot be carried like a dead weight" (LB 428). From
the perspective of the Monthly Review, however, the
cooperative power of readers to accept or reject
elements of a work of art both keeps them safe from
moral contamination and ensures that the products of
contaminated genius can be read and appreciated despite
their flaws. The Monthly Review could recommend Don
Juan, though in qualified terms, because the reviewer
trusted in the ability of Byron's readers to withstand
any possible harm that could be inflicted on them by
the poet's great, if morally imperfect, power.
Like the Literary Gazette and the Monthly Review,
the Eclectic Review and Blackwood's also noticed Don
Juan shortly after its publication, and these
reviewers, too, saw Byron as a personal force in his
poem, the controlling genius behind its powerful
199
effects. However, the Eclectic Review and Blackwood1s
refused to recommend Byron's poem on the grounds that
the poet's flaws had overwhelmed and infected his
evident genius, leading him to launch a dangerously
seductive assault on his audience. According to these
reviewers, it was no longer safe for readers to trust
themselves alone with Byron. Indeed, the Eclectic
Review avoided even the mention of Don Juan by name,
slipping three pages of oblique commentary on the poem
into a critique of Mazeppa. This reviewer, like his
colleagues at the Literary Gazette and Monthly Review,
supplied a theory of genius to his readers in order to
help them unravel the personal motives behind Don
Juan * s improprieties.
The article began with a consideration of fame,
defining it as the insatiable appetite that induces
poets to try progressively more astonishing stunts in
the hope of exciting wonder and admiration. According
to this theory, the fame of a poet is a measure of his
changing relationship with his public, a relationship
that may degenerate over time into a display of the
poet's control over his readers:
[T]his ambition for fame may at length
grow wanton in its choice of expedients
for procuring to the sated egotist the
requisite solace of his self-
complacency: it may lead him to take
pleasure in setting at defiance the good
opinions of those whose imaginations he
200
has brought into captivity to his
genius, and when he has roused to arms
against him all the better feeling of
human nature, in snatching away in spite
of all resistance the forced tribute of
their homage, and even, though modified
by abhorrence, their admiration. (12
[1819]: 148)
By implication, Don Juan was an example of such a
ruined literary relationship, for it was an attempt to
wield vicious power over an audience. Moreover, this
reviewer had little faith in the ability of readers to
resist the contamination of such vicious poetry, and he
advised them to avoid it as a menace. Healthy genius
might exert a positive influence upon an audience, but
the Eclectic Review saw in Don Juan the "irresistible
fascination" of a mind still manifesting "transcendent
faculties," yet in the last stages of moral depravity
(148-49).
To read Don Juan, therefore, was to risk acquiring
Byron's own moral disease, for though the reader's
relationship with the poet was conducted indirectly
through the printed page, it was nevertheless intimate
and quite real. This critic warned that it was highly
dangerous even to examine the poem with an eye to
discerning the revolting effects of degenerated genius,
for "such a lesson would be dearly purchased at the
cost of familiar association with the individual."
201
Moreover, to this reviewer, "familiar association" with
Byron had always been a danger in reading his poetry:
We have followed Lord Byron thus far in
his career; we care not to enter further
into his secret. We have had enough of
that with which his poetry is replete—
himself. The necessary progress of
character as developed in his last
reputed production, has conducted him to
a point at which it is no longer safe to
follow him even in thought, for fear we
should be beguiled of any portion of the
detestation due to this bold outrage.
Poetry which it is impossible not to
read without admiration, yet, which it
is equally impossible to admire without
losing some degree of self-respect; such
as no brother could read aloud to his
sister, no husband to his wife;— poetry
in which the deliberate purpose of the
Author is to corrupt by inflaming the
mind, to seduce to the love of evil
which he has himself chosen as good; can
be safely dealt with only in one way, by
passing it over in silence. (149)
This review implied that by creating an innovative
poetry that was replete with his own personality, Byron
had destroyed the aesthetic distance that might have
made his poems safe to read. And, according to the
Eclectic Review, it was no accident that Byron had
filled his poem with his wicked self, for the poet's
motives seemed obvious: a deliberate intention of
corrupting his readers. Even his mixture of styles
appeared to be an assertion of his power to lead the
reader wherever he pleased:
202
When he calculates that the reader is on
the verge of pitying him, he takes care
to throw him back the defiance of
laughter, as if to let him know that all
the Poet's pathos is but the
sentimentalism of the drunkard between
his cups, or the relenting softness of
the courtesan, who the next moment
resumes the bad boldness of her degraded
character. With such a man who would
wish either to laugh or to weep? And
yet, who that reads him, can refrain
alternately from either? (150)
Oddly, by advising its readers to avoid Don Juan,
the Eclectic Review was paying a backhanded tribute to
Byron's overwhelming genius and power. Had he been a
less powerful poet, the righteous reader might have
perused Don Juan in safety, fully in control of his own
reaction to the evil confronting him. And yet, for
this reviewer, it was only Byron's genius that made his
poetry worth reading at all. If the very attraction of
Don Juan was also its danger, readers would be well
advised to forgo this test of their own moral resolve.
The Blackwood's review of Don Juan also combined
an admission of Byron's genius with the conclusion that
he had exerted his great power in Don Juan to corrupt
and control his readers. This article, which has been
variously attributed to John Gibson Lockhart, John
Wilson, and the entire staff of Blackwood's, began by
stating that, if it were not for the genius
demonstrated in this tainted poem, Blackwood1s would
have greeted its appearance with a dignified silence.2
203
For, according to this reviewer, the "corruptions" of
Don Juan were "effectually embalmed" by its genius, so
that—
in spite of all that critics can do or
refrain from doing, nothing can possibly
prevent fDon Juanl from taking a high
place in the literature of our country,
and remaining to all ages a perpetual
monument of the exalted intellect, and
the depraved heart, of one of the most
remarkable men to whom that country has
had the honour and the disgrace of
giving birth. (5 [1819]: 512)
Thus the starting point for this denunciation of Don
Juan was yet another concession of its power.
According to this review, Don Juan was, of all
Byron's works, the most "decisively and triumphantly
expressive of the greatness of his genius."
Nevertheless, in this poem Byron's great power had been
misappropriated and put to use in a struggle between
the evil in the poet and the virtue in his reader:
[T]he great genius of the man seems to
have been throughout exerted to its
utmost strength, in devising every
possible method of pouring scorn upon
every element of good or noble nature in
the hearts of his readers. Love—
honour— patriotism— religion, are
mentioned only to be scoffed at and
derided, as if their sole resting-place
were, or ought to be, in the bosoms of
fools. (513)
This critic, too, noted Byron's versatility of style
and mood, but he took these qualities as proof, not of
A
204
the poet's high genius, but of his debased and cynical
personality:
It appears, in short, as if this
miserable man, having exhausted every
species of sensual gratification— having
drained the cup of sin even to its
bitterest dregs, were resolved to shew
us that he is no longer a human being,
even in his frailties;— but a cool
unconcerned fiend, laughing with a
detestable glee over the whole of the
better and worse elements of which human
life is composed— treating well nigh
with equal derision the most pure of
virtues, and the most odious of vices—
dead alike to the beauty of the one, and
the deformity of the other— a mere
heartless despiser of that frail but
noble humanity, whose type was never
exhibited in a shape of more deplorable
degradation than in his own
contemptuously distinct delineation of
himself. (513)
Blackwood1s also joined other journals in pointing
out that to read Don Juan was to meet the poet himself,
for the entire poem seemed crafted as a fiendish self-
portrait. In this poem, that is, as in none of his
others, Byron had revealed his hidden determination to
manipulate his readers and control their reactions to
his work:
Every high thought that was ever kindled
in our breasts by the muse of Byron—
every pure and lofty feeling that ever
responded from within us to the sweep of
his majestic inspirations— every
remembered moment of admiration and
enthusiasm is up in arms against him.
We look back with a mixture of wrath and
scorn to the delight with which we
205
suffered ourselves to be filled by one
who, all the while he was furnishing us
with delight, must, we cannot doubt it,
have been mocking us with a cruel
mockery. . . . The consciousness of the
insulting deceit which has been
practised upon us, mingles with the
nobler pain arising from the
contemplation of perverted and degraded
genius— to make us wish that no such
being as Byron ever had existed.
(514-15)
Byron had placed himself, or at least his self-
portrait, in Don Juan, and it was no surprise that his
readers responded to the poet as well as the poem. In
particular, his swings between sublimity and low humor
made the critic in Blackwood1s suspect that Byron had
been laughing at his readers all along when in his
earlier works he had convinced a trusting audience to
let him lift them into the sublime. Now the poet
seemed to haul his audience forcibly from pathos to
satire and back again, so that formerly submissive
readers might well feel that they had once been
possessed by a diabolical fiend.
The Blackwood1s review, like the other
contemporary reviews discussed in this chapter, placed
Don Juan for its readers squarely in the context of an
on-going relationship between author and audience.
According to the Literary Gazette, the basis of this
literary relationship was Byron's poetic ability to
command his contemporary readers' souls despite their
misgivings about the irreverence and licentiousness of
his poetry. The Monthly Review saw the relationship
between Byron and his audience as even more complex,
ascribing the mixed reactions elicited by Don Juan to
Byron's conflicting desire both to please and displease
his readers. In spite of the semi-adversarial
relationship described by this review, the journal
nevertheless trusted Byron's audience to distill the
virtues of this poem from the mass of its human
imperfections. The Eclectic Review, on the other hand,
saw Don Juan as a moral danger to its readers, a
product, not of a great poet's conflicting purposes,
but of his corrupt desire to wield unrighteous poetic
dominion over his audience. Blackwood's, in turn, saw
Don Juan as an unmasking of the poet's lifelong, and
heretofore hidden, desire to mock his readers in the
midst of their delight, just as his rapidly varying
styles and moods in this new poem continually
transformed the author's serious stances into
ridiculous postures, leaving his readers with an
impression that they were in literary league with a
devil.
These four reviews differed widely in their
estimations of Byron and the quality of his
relationship with the British public. Yet all of them
were united in seeing Don Juan as a human and personal
207
encounter as well as an artistic and intellectual one.
Hence, to these reviewers, and presumably to the
British public, Byron was no shadowy and distant figure
hidden behind the pages of his poetry, irrelevant to an
appreciation of his works, but a real and intense
personage illuminating all his poems. Indeed, these
reviewers described his poems as meeting places where
the public would encounter the author on his own
linguistic and imaginative ground. Don Juan provided
Byron's critics with an unparalleled opportunity to
judge the poet and his relationship with readers. From
their own perspective, critics could choose to concede
to Byron his authorial right to exercise command over
the reading audience; on the other hand, they could,
and did, defend the equal rights and powers of readers
to exercise judgment on the poet and his work.
The evidence of Byron's letters suggests that he,
too, was aware that he and his readers had reached a
crisis in their relationship, and he, like his critics,
saw Don Juan as an opportunity to decide the power of
author and audience. Byron viewed Don Juan as a
vehicle for his poetic genius, and he vacillated
between trust in his ability to force his readers to
laugh with him and perverse resolutions to content
himself with assaulting their moral and literary
sensibilities. Despite the Coleridgean myth of
208
isolated genius, all poets who publish hope to affect
an audience. Byron, however, was at odds with his
readers, though still bound to them by literary ties,
and he could no longer be sure that they would follow
his lead. Don Juan seems to have been an experiment
designed to discover how much of his power remained.
The Don Juan crisis was only one intense and noisy
skirmish in the long Romantic battle to define genius
and authorial power. But it was an important literary
event, one that demonstrated the energetic efforts of
poet and critic to gain control of their transactions
with one another. Wordsworth created a myth of genius
to substantiate his own desire for authorial control,
and Byron later drew on this myth to substantiate his
own claims. But these poetic assertions of power were
always met in the Romantic Period by the equal and
opposite claims of critics.
In some sense, however, Wordsworth and Byron won
their battles with critics long after both parties had
ceased firing printed blasts at one another. For, when
the complex interactive documents of Romanticism were
later reduced to a standardized canon, the multiplicity
of Romantic viewpoints on genius were lost. Only the
most poetic and idealized versions of the genius myth
remained, no longer opposed by the critical context
that led poets to create them.
NOTES
1. See the following for evidence that Byron and
Murray were keenly aware of how much audiences would
tolerate: Andrew Rutherford, Bvron the Best Seller;
Thilo von Bremen, Lord Bvron als Erfolqsautor; and
Peter J. Manning, ' ’Don Juan and the Revisionary Self,"
forthcoming.
2. See the introduction to the Blackwood's section in
Part A, Volume 1 of Reiman's The Romantics Reviewed.
Interestingly, the two major critical journals, the
Quarterly Review (which was owned by Byron's publisher
Murray) and the Edinburgh Review, printed no review of
the first two cantos of Don Juan, instead confining
their remarks to sideswipes at the poem contained in
reviews of other works.
210
CHAPTER 5
THE ROMANTIC LEGACY IN COMPOSITION THEORY
You need to be like the ancient mariner
who has the power simply to look the
reader in the eye and start talking and
thereby paralyze her: prevent her from
moving away, compel her to listen, and
compel her to experience everything you
are saying.
Peter Elbow, Writing with Power
During the early nineteenth century, the mythical
ideal of authorial genius was clearly situated in the
context of a debate about originality and the related
power struggle between authors and critics. Yet one of
the strongest legacies of Romanticism has been the
tendency to extract certain documents in that debate
from their historical context and to take their
renderings of the genius myth as gospel. The canonized
versions of the myth, including Wordsworth's 1802
Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Chapters 13 and 14 in
Coleridge's Biographia. have long been anthologized in
literary textbooks as representations of the true
spirit of Romanticism. In contrast, until the recent
surge of interest in the historical context of literary
works, contemporary Romantic reviews have largely gone
211
unread by students, except for brief excerpts from
reviews printed in the critical apparatus attached to
Romantic texts. Hence the genius myth has survived
almost unchallenged, asserting authorial power without
the limitations on that power that were set by Romantic
reviewers. Implicitly, these anthologized versions of
the genius myth accept Wordsworth's claim to speak for
his generation, while dismissing contemporary reviews
as outdated "secondary" sources that are inferior to
the primary texts of Romanticism. When the reviews are
also taken seriously it becomes clear that, despite the
Romantic idealization of genius, critics played a
crucial role in a literary community where authorial
power was always balanced by professional response.
But it is tempting from a modern perspective to
repudiate the critics' regulatory claims as evidence of
their myopic inability to appreciate the poetic
innovations unfolding in front of their eyes.
The canonized versions of the myth of genius have
not only endured as dominant pictures of Romanticism;
they have also preserved a set of basic assumptions
about writing and writers, and, stripped of their
historical context, these assumptions continue to exert
a considerable influence on modern composition theory
and teaching. Since the 1960s, the major division in
composition theory has been between those who advocate
212
a rhetorical view of writing and the neo-Romantic
theorists who argue that writing is primarily a matter
of self-discovery and expression. Granted, the complex
intellectual sources for neo-Romantic pedagogies are
not yet fully understood; as Berlin has pointed out,
the diverse theories that fall into this category seem
to have been variously influenced by surrealist art,
Carl Rogers' psychology of the self, Ernst Cassirer and
Suzanne Langer's philosophies of language, and the
radical political movements of the 1960s (Rhetoric and
Reality 145-55). Nor is it clear at present exactly
how the Romantic legacy was transmitted to modern
compositionists. (See the appendix to this
dissertation for a brief review of research in this
area.) Nevertheless, though much work remains to be
done, it is increasingly obvious that modern
expressivist theories owe a substantial debt to
Romantic ideas about writing. Indeed, many current
assumptions about student writers and their work bear a
remarkable resemblance to the Romantic myth of the
poetic genius. One of the most influential endowments
of Romanticism has been this powerfully convincing
framework for understanding writing events.
This chapter will examine the remnants of the
genius myth in four modern theories: those written by
Ken Macrorie, William Coles, Ann Berthoff, and Peter
213
Elbow. Between the 1960s and the 1980s these four
theorists constructed composition pedagogies that
differ in execution but unite in transmitting the
genius myth nearly intact, as a complete and self-
sufficient means of representing writing events,
emphasizing the writer's power and attempting to ignore
the external events that help shape acts of "private"
creation. There are, however, some key distortions and
omissions in neo-Romantic writing theory. Wordsworth
and Coleridge devised the genius myth to explain the
rare power of original poets, and they argued only that
thoroughly educated and intellectually prepared
geniuses were justified in ignoring contrary criticism
of their works. The neo-Romantic compositionists, on
the other hand, make the same radical claim for
developing writers, arguing that students have the
natural power to generate compelling texts with
scarcely a thought for their readers, creating their
own literary standards without an educated mastery of
previous texts or the conventions of art.
Of these four theorists, Macrorie, Coles, and
Berthoff present the strongest cases against a
rhetorical view of language. Like Wordsworth, they
argue that writing takes place in a corrupted community
where a rigid set of conventions governs audience
expectations; that the solution to this corruption lies
214
in reconnecting the writer with an internal source of
natural power; and that writing improves as authors
gain the confidence to satisfy their own artistic goals
instead of the expectations of an audience. Elbow also
preserves these three elements of the myth of genius in
his composition theory; however, he suggests that the
internal search for power is one stage in a complex
composing process in which writers should alternate
among generating texts, editing them, and submitting
them to readers for response. While Macrorie, Coles,
and Berthoff take to its logical extreme the
Wordsworthian view that rhetorical power comes from a
private source inside the writer, Elbow argues that
acts of writing occur in a tension between the
expressive and the rhetorical. Nevertheless, he
reveals his neo-Romantic bias by continuing to maintain
the dominance of expressive considerations over
rhetorical ones. All four theorists treat developing
writers as incipient Wordsworths who are justified in
ignoring criticism whenever it goes against their own
better j udgment.
The Environment for Writing
215
In the preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth
described an increasingly urban literary world in which
"a multitude of causes unknown to former times" were
"acting with a combined force to blunt the
discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for
all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of
almost savage torpor" (LB 243). According to
Wordsworth, the main cause of this mental deterioration
was the shift of populations away from rural
environments into overcrowded cities, where men’s and
women's minds were so dulled by "the uniformity of
their occupations" that they began to experience "a
craving for extraordinary incident" (243). Moreover,
he argued, those who produced and published popular
literature were contributing to the degeneration of
British minds, for their "frantic novels, sickly and
stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and
extravagant stories in verse" served only to increase
the Briton's "degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation." As Wordsworth saw it, authors and
publishers had habituated readers to this sensational
literary fare instead of providing them with a healthy
diet of natural art, the only lasting remedy for the
chronic disorder of British intellectual appetites.
216
The more addicted readers became to these texts full of
exhilarating incidents and artificial language, the
more alienated they grew from their own minds and
hearts.
Similarly, Macrorie, Coles, Berthoff, and Elbow
describe a modern educational setting in which writing
assignments act to detach students from their natural
sources of linguistic and composition power. In his
college writing textbook Telling Writing Macrorie
denounces typical English classrooms as toxic
environments that are poisoned by the register of
pedagogic falsity he calls Engfish, "the official
language of the school" (14). Wordsworth held that the
conventional literary language of his day maintained
British readers in a state of psychological
degradation; Macrorie argues that because the American
educational system encourages students to master the
conventions of Engfish instead of "natural" language,
the major, though unintentional, effect of schooling is
to teach students to lie: "School," he insists, "is
the last place an objective observer should expect to
encounter students speaking or writing truths that
count for them. Unwittingly it's designed to nurture
copycatting and phoniness" (286).
In describing the classroom writer as tainted by a
corrupt educational environment, Macrorie seems to echo
Wordsworth's belligerent insistence that the minds of
most of his contemporaries, particularly those of his
critics, had been poisoned by a false aesthetic
language. But on closer examination it becomes clear
that Wordsworth's argument for a contaminated literary
environment is considerably more complex than
Macrorie's wholesale dismissal of traditional writing
education. In his autobiographical poem The Prelude
Wordsworth revealed a distinct ambivalence about
education, which he described both as a kind of mental
and physical captivity and as an essential component of
his own intellectual development. Indeed, this entire
poem may be read as an extended inquiry into the
development of his own genius in the same environment
that eventually stunted the creative powers of most of
his fellows. In Book 2 ("School-Time") Wordsworth
asserted that every human infant experiences in his
mother's arms a natural oneness with the world,
enabling him to perceive and construct the universe
communicated through his senses. According to
Wordsworth, this innate and universal creative
capacity, eventually lost in the majority of humankind,
forms the core around which the future poet's genius
can develop:
. . . Such, verily, is the first
Poetic spirit of our human life,
By uniform control of after years,
218
In most, abated or suppressed; in some,
Through every change of growth and of
decay,
Pre-eminent till death. (2: 260-65)
Wordsworth suggested that these natural poetic
powers can be supported both by experiences in the
natural world and by a solid classical education, like
the one he received at Hawkshead School. For he
believed that "antiquity and steadfast truth / And
strong book-mindedness" will teach students to avoid
slavish devotion to contemporary aesthetic fads in
favor of "a healthy sound simplicity" (3: 397-98, 399).
Though education had only partially supplied his own
intellectual needs, Wordsworth blessed books for what
they had given him: "as Powers / For ever to be
hallowed; only less, / For what we are and what we may
become, / Than Nature's self, which is the breath of
God ..." (5: 219-22). Moreover, Wordsworth retained
enough faith in education to involve himself in
contemporary schemes for educational improvement.1
Similarly, Bioctraohia Literaria records
Coleridge's sense of intellectual indebtedness to the
education he had received under the strict and heavy
hand of James Boyer at Christ's Hospital. Though the
memory of his master's composition lessons remained
with Coleridge even in adulthood as a recurring
nightmare, he credited Boyer with having taught him the
219
value of precise and appropriate literary diction and
recommends one particular technique as "imitable and
worthy of imitation”:
He would often permit our theme
exercises, under some pretext of want of
time, to accumulate, till each lad had
four or five to be looked over. Then
placing the whole number abreast on his
desk, he would ask the writer, why this
or that sentence might not have found as
appropriate a place under this or that
other thesis; and if no satisfying
answer could be returned, and two faults
of the same kind were found in one
exercise, the irrevocable verdict
followed, the exercise was torn up, and
another on the same subject to be
produced, in addition to the tasks of
the day. The reader will, I trust,
excuse this tribute of recollection to a
man, whose severities, even now, not
seldom furnish the dreams, by which the
blind fancy would fain interpret to the
mind the painful sensations of
distempered sleep; but neither lessen
nor dim the deep sense of my moral and
intellectual obligations. (1: 11)
While Wordsworth and Coleridge credited their
education, however faulty, with having helped them
escape the worst aesthetic excesses of the day, neo-
Romantics tend on principle to dismiss what can be
learned from books, describing students as
unimpeachable sources of their own composing power.
According to this notion, writing is not a skill that
must be taught to students but is instead an innate
human ability that can easily be extinguished in an
improper educational environment. These theorists
220
suggest, therefore, that true education in composition
is teaching students to trust themselves.
Accordingly, Macrorie's neo-Romantic pedagogy
counsels teachers to facilitate student learning rather
than try to teach writing directly. Instead of
smothering their pupils with aesthetic principles and
conventions, teachers should help students find the
linguistic life within them, teach them how to nurture
that life, and avoid injuring the first tender shoots
of originality. Wordsworth's myth of genius described
the writer as a hero who has labored long and
diligently to uncover the natural principles of art in
his own heart and mind; Macrorie describes even the
immature writer as the hero of her own literary
battles, possessing a unique internal store of language
and truth.
Like Macrorie, William Coles describes American
writing classrooms as educational wastelands where the
natural powers of students are left to wither on the
vine. Macrorie denounces the untruthfulness of
Engfish; Coles condemns the linguistic corruption
introduced by "the Literary Form known as The English
Paper or Theme." In his college composition text
Composing: Writing as a Self-Creating Process, he
informs students that producing themes has taught them
a systematic means of disconnecting themselves from
221
their words: "Themewriting is a language, a way of
experiencing the world. It is nonwriting rather than
writing" (23). Coles goes on to quote for students his
own discussion of themewriting in an article in College
English:
Invented originally by English teachers
for use in English classrooms only, it
is as closed a language as the Dewey
Decimal System, as calculatedly
dissociated from the concerns of its
user and the world he lives in as it has
been possible to make it. . . . Writing
seen as a trick that can be played, a
device that can be put into operation,
is also a technique that can be taught
and learned— just as one can be taught
or can learn to run an adding machine,
or pour concrete. And once equipped
with this skill a writer can write a
Theme about anything, and at a moment's
notice. (23)
According to Coles, the student who succeeds in
mastering the ability to "write a Theme about anything"
has learned to sacrifice herself in the interest of
getting by in the classroom and elsewhere. That is,
Coles sees a direct link between linguistic expression
and moral choice. Indeed, neo-Romantic theory in
general is permeated by a self-righteous tendency to
link existing pedagogy with moral degradation and to
describe its own classroom techniques as a means of
reforming student souls. Macrorie maintains that
Engfish teaches students to lie, as though they did not
enter English classrooms already in possession of this
222
ability. Similarly, Coles suggests that mastering
phony educational conventions introduces linguistic and
even moral corruption into the pristine minds of
students. As he explains in College English,
themewriting tempts them to subordinate the life within
them to the values of the surrounding culture:
It is a valuable technique to know . . .
because like the American dollar it is
negotiable anywhere— and its buying
power is unlimited. A student can use
the technique of Themewriting not only
to write papers but to plan a career or
a marriage, to organize a life even.
(136-37)
Coles warns darkly that, once students start
themewriting their lives, it might be impossible to
purify themselves of this wicked practice: "Yes, the
habit of Themewriting was a choice. . . . But maybe
not always a free one, and maybe not one that remained
open forever" (Plural I 76).
Similarly, Ann Berthoff argues that existing
educational conventions distract students from the
powerful cognitive processes of their own minds. In
The Making of Meaning Berthoff states that a false view
of composition permeates the national hysteria about
literacy, so that teachers, administrators and
politicians have been seduced into believing the
problem a failure in correctness, easily solvable with
more and better workbook exercises. But according to
223
Berthoff the much vaunted literacy crisis is a crisis
of mind, not of grammar:
it isn't just that your students and
mine don't know the rules governing the
use of the comma or that they can't
spell parallel. only, and rhythm. It's
that they can't hear what is said; they
can't read with the normal expectations
of an experienced reader; they don't
talk with any sense of continuity—
everything is in the eternal present,
including the narration of past events.
If our students can't talk, can't
listen, can't read with the resources,
experience, and flexibility that we
generally presuppose, why should we be
surprised when they don't write very
well? (23)
The source of this cognitive crisis, according to
Berthoff, has been the failure of educators to see that
composition uses the fundamental creative abilities of
the human mind. Composing, to Berthoff, is nothing
less than the ability to make sense of the world, and
she argues that composition teachers should help
students make connections between their writing
assignments and the innate, universal powers they have
brought with them into the classroom. As Berthoff
explains to other writing teachers, "My point is that
we do not have to teach our students how to abstract
but that they abstract" (Making of Meaning 75).
Berthoff's textbook for college writers, Forming.
Thinking. Writing, is designed to awaken in students
the imaginative powers she believes they already
224
possess and to allow students to develop and refine
those powers through writing. Berthoff not only
teaches students that they possess such an inner
imaginative power; she gives them model paragraphs that
are written by a variety of "artists and critics
concerned with artistic making," including
I. A. Richards, Gertrude Stein, Paul Klee, William
Blake, and Coleridge (2 26). Thus, while failing to
give students the contextual and historical background
that might have enabled them to critique these ideas,
she demonstrates for the informed reader the line of
intellectual descent that prompted her to view the
imagination as a central inner power.
For example, one of two quotations from Coleridge
in Berthoff1s textbook is taken from Chapter 14 of the
Bioqraphia and contains his description of the genius
of the ideal poet, who "brings the whole soul of man
into activity" and "diffuses a tone and spirit of
unity, that blends, and (as it were fuses. each into
each by that synthetic and magical power, to which I
would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination"
(233). Berthoff gives students no sense of the complex
tissue of borrowings that underlies this passage on
creative unity as well as the rest of the Bioqraphia.
Moreover, her silence and lack of analysis imply that
this unifying activity properly belongs to developing
225
student writers, not just ideal geniuses, by virtue of
their universal human inheritance. Yet, earlier in the
Bioqraphia. Coleridge acknowledged that his own
earliest poems were marred by too much trust in his
abilities: "my mind was not then sufficiently
disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a
substitute for my own conviction" (1: 7).
Peter Elbow agrees with Macrorie, Coles, and
Berthoff that composition teaching frequently ignores
the natural powers that students possess, and he admits
that "fs]chools often reward boring obvious writing"
(Writing without Teachers 72). Nevertheless, unlike
his fellow neo-Romantic compositionists, Elbow refuses
to blame schools for what he sees as a broader
communication problem. He maintains that despite our
pretense that we are in linguistic contact with one
another, all human beings inhabit a corrupt world in
which "[e]veryone walks around mostly out of
communication with everyone else." According to Elbow,
the first step in breaking through our interpersonal
barriers is to admit that they exist, as "When
noncommunication is more out in the open, good
communication can begin" (Writing without Teachers
121-22, 123).
Because of his lack of faith in human
communication, Elbow takes to an extreme the neo-
226
Romantic position that it is impossible to teach
composition directly to students. He argues that, in
this world where language is an untrustworthy
instrument of communication, there are no transferable
rules for good writing. He confides in students, "When
people try to tell me about good and bad writing, it
doesn't usually improve my writing at all; and when I
try to tell other people it seldom improves their
writing either" (Writing without Teachers vii). Hence
Elbow makes the composition teacher superfluous in his
pedagogy by encouraging students to form teacherless
writing classes in which people who want to learn to
write can encourage one another to practice writing and
share their work. His text Writing without Teachers is
designed to help students escape their own
communicative binds.
These teacherless writing classes are to provide a
setting in which writers may learn in the absence of
external authority to find their own inner sources of
literary power, while at the same time they retain the
benefit of submitting texts to readers in order to
obtain experimental evidence of the effectiveness of
their writing. Wordsworth appeared to envision the
entire publication process as an extended experiment on
reader's minds conducted under the authoritative
control of his genius. Similarly, Elbow counsels
227
students to take control of their texts, listening to
reader responses and then deciding for themselves what
to do with this information.
Significantly, though the teacher is superfluous
in Elbow's system, the theorist and textbook writer is
not, for Elbow claims to be able to guide students
through the inherently contradictory process of being
as fully themselves as possible and also as open as
possible to reader feedback. Indeed, though all four
of these theorists have set up pedagogies in which they
pay homage to the power of the individual student
writer, indirectly the most powerful figure in each
system is the textbook-writer and theorist who devised
it. For Macrorie, Coles, Berthoff, and Elbow, the goal
of teaching is to empower students to escape the
corrupt linguistic environment in which they write.
But in order to do so, each of these theorists must
also stake an implicit claim to see more clearly than
other theorists and teachers the means of escaping that
corruption. They submit, that is, a hidden ethical
proof of their own argument, implying, like Wordsworth,
that they themselves have managed somehow to escape the
linguistic corruption that taints others. The neo-
Romantics, too, use the myth of genius to cast
themselves in the role of the heroes who guide and
develop the abilities of students and teachers alike.
228
Yet, since they aim to empower other writers,
these neo-Romantic compositionists must also walk the
same delicate line traversed by Romantic reviewers,
balancing praise of the individual writer’s power with
their own claims to guide the writer. Macrorie, Coles,
Berthoff, and Elbow describe student writers as
developing geniuses who lack the ability to assert
their own authority until empowered to do so by a
sympathetic teacher or textbook writer. Teachers may
not be able to tell their students how to create
original prose. But, under the guidance of the neo-
Romantic theorist, they can construct a classroom
environment where natural power (or at least the
particular writing style the teacher believes to be
natural) can be fostered.
Elbow suggests teacherless writing classes as a
way out of this dilemma, for students who want to learn
to write can set up their own supportive writing
environments. On the other hand, Macrorie claims that
in his writing classes students learn the techniques,
such as freewriting and revision, that will allow them
to draw upon their own natural power. Ignoring the
many differences between speech and academic writing,
he assures them that they already know how to write
powerfully because they have been immersed in language
for years:
229
So there you can . . . be, . . . sitting
innocently at a desk or table, being
visited by literary and rhetorical
strategies that people have been taught
to believe belong only to professionals.
The saying is, "Writers are born, not
made." Some truth there, but I'd have
to add, "And we're all writers, at
times." Words don't select a few
deserving or anointed persons to call
on. They come to us all, and sometimes
splashing brilliance. (Telling
Writing 6)
Ironically, when neo-Romantic compositionists
situate composing power within the writer herself, they
tend, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, to
describe that power as operating outside the writer's
direct control. Macrorie argues that good writing
visits student writers, who can welcome this power but
not control its coming. Just as the composition
teacher must create the environment in which truthful
writing can occur, the writer herself can only generate
words by setting up the conditions under which flashes
of linguistic brilliance are most likely to strike:
"Naturally," Macrorie advises his student readers,
"we'll write better if we keep the door open and take
care of our guests when they arrive." In this
theoretical approach, invention is a mysterious
creative gift that comes to all who recognize its
power, not just to the outstanding geniuses of the
literary world.2 Once students recognize their own
230
power, they need only welcome inspiration when it comes
and revise wisely.
Historically, at least two kinds of pedagogy have
arisen from theories of magical invention. Hugh Blair
and his inheritors in the current-traditional model of
composition reason that invention is impossible to
teach, so they concentrate instead on inculcating
stylistic correctness in the classroom. In contrast,
the neo-Romantic compositionists retain a belief that,
though invention cannot be taught to students, the
environment that stimulates invention can be created in
the classroom. Still, most neo-Romantic
compositionists stop short of claiming that the
environment they advocate is the only one that will
work to encourage good student writing. Macrorie
expresses a certain reluctance to give advice either to
students or to teachers, despite his implicit claim to
possess the secret to unlocking student power. In the
"Suggestions for Teachers" at the back of Telling
Writing he issues this combined claim and caveat:
Many teachers around the country have
broken loose and found a way of enabling
their students to write alive. By hit
and miss they have constructed a whole
enabling process. But what may work for
them and their students may not be
congenial to others. Here's the process
I have patched together. I don't say it
is the way, but it has been tested.
(283)
Coles, too, is uncomfortably aware that theorists
who seek to empower the individual writer ought to
respect the autonomy both of other teachers and of
students themselves. He reports his own desire to
withhold judgments from his students, hoping to help
them discover for themselves the principles of good
writing during the course of the term. In
The Plural I. Coles describes one writing class he
taught and notes that, when students produced badly
written sentences, he struggled to avoid correcting
them but did so anyway:
In such a situation, particularly at the
beginning of the term, I have difficulty
resisting the temptation to be of the
kind of help that is finally no help. I
was afraid that, if I worked with the
sentences without being able to bring
the students to see them for what they
were, I'd be unable to resist telling
them what at the same time I know is of
value only when someone works it out for
himself. But I decided to work with the
sentences anyway, gambling that I could
get things to break my way. It was a
gamble I lost. (27)
According to this educational model, students must
discover for themselves the principles of composition,
for only then will such principles be of real utility
in improving their writing. Coleridge credited Boyer
with teaching students to value exact literary diction,
and reminisced that these early lessons formed the
basis of his later poetic theory. But Coles will have
232
none of this, insisting that the only lesson worth
learning must come from the neophyte writer herself,
without the explicit guidance of professorial
authority.
Like Macrorie, Coles also professes to be
reluctant to offer direct advice on how to teach
writing:
when it comes to someone1s helping
someone else to write or to teach
writing, the most that would seem
possible is for the someone to enact his
notion of what is involved in the
activity in such , a way as to demand that
others respond with an enactment of what
for them is involved in it.
(Plural I 1)
At this point, Coles’ own style has disintegrated
nearly into incoherence as he scrambles to make it
clear that everyone in the world of college
composition— teachers, students, and theorists alike—
ought to be empowered to follow his or her own
individual bent. The Romantic myth of genius granted
the greatest writers the theoretical power to dominate
written transactions. But Coles envisions a radically
individualized intellectual world, in which the only
universal standard would be the requirement that all
inhabitants be themselves:
Beyond suggesting that a course in
writing ought to focus on the writing of
the members of it (rather than on
233
something else), and that teachers of
writing ought to develop a methodology
with the subject that is an extension of
themselves, I have no desire to tell
anyone else how he or she ought to go
about handling the subject. The
effectiveness of my way, finally, is
that it is my way. (Plural I 2)
Coles is able to maintain, therefore, both that he has
penetrated to the natural source of power through self-
creative composition and that other teachers may
discover other sources of natural student power, as
long as they agree to center a pedagogy on student
writing and insist on doing what works for them.
Berthoff betrays no such qualms about telling
other instructors how to teach writing. Instead she
takes on herself the cause of championing the natural
composing powers that students bring with them into the
classroom, which must, she insists, be respected by
teachers. Unlike Elbow, who argues that students can
do without teachers altogether, Berthoff asserts that
students need teachers to tell them what they already
know. She contends that, though "students don't know
how to edit," they already know how to compose, for
"they are born composers and compose they do, whether
they know it or not" (Making of Meaning 80).
Accordingly, Berthoff calls her writing assignments
"assisted invitations," guided opportunities for
students to find their own path rather than following a
234
route set out by others. This terminology, she informs
students—
comes from I. A. Richards, who once
claimed that what we need in teaching
reading and writing is 'not so much some
improved philosophic and psychological
doctrine, though no one should despise
that, as sets of sequenced exercises
through which . . . people could
explore, for themselves, their own
abilities and grow in capacity,
practical and intelligential, as a
result. . . .1 (2)
Despite the reservations expressed by Macrorie,
Coles, Elbow, and Berthoff about prescribing ways for
others to write, the act of constructing reformist
composition pedagogies forces them to claim a better
knowledge of the student-writer1s natural power than
students and previous theorists have possessed. All
four, then, find themselves in a position that is
similar to that occupied by Romantic reviewers. While
professing to believe that students have ultimate power
over their own words, these theorists must at the same
time suggest that in a confused and corrupted
educational world, they offer the best chance of saving
student minds. As teacher-theorists dedicated to
helping students improve their writing, rather than
critics passing judgment on new works, the neo-Romantic
compositionists are in a genuine dilemma, for though
they are each clearly committed to a certain standard
235
for good writing, they must at least pretend to confine
themselves to steering students toward discovering
these standards on their own. One suspects that
frequently neo-Romantic classes are structured so that
students are pushed to discover the particular
aesthetic standards held by the teacher, while the
process is made to appear an act of self-discovery.
The Power Within
The second legacy inherited by neo-Romantic
writing theory is the tendency to ascribe the
effectiveness of written words to the author's own
inner power. Again, modern theorists appear to have
taken the Romantic myth of genius at face value,
accepting its assumptions without the contextual
correctives that originally modified its claims.
Wordsworth and Coleridge argued that the source of
poetic power in a corrupt aesthetic world was inside
the genius himself. Yet they also made it clear that
young writers need a comprehensive education in
existing literature in order to develop their own
talents. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth
admitted that his poems failed to meet the expectations
of British readers, and he offered these readers a new
236
aesthetic contract. He justified this new contract,
not only on the basis of his own meditative experience,
but also on the grounds that he had thoroughly studied
contemporary and classical English literature and had
penetrated to the eternal principles of natural art.
Thus, according to Wordsworth's understanding, the
literary genius had to examine existing conventions in
order to organize a revolutionary overthrow of them.
Similarly, in the Bioqraphia Coleridge advocated
that budding writers receive a solid literary education
that included "the productions of contemporary genius"
as well as the classical texts of the past. In these
contemporary works the developing writer could discover
"an actual friendship as of a man for a man," for
though the student writer might be cowed before the
genius of the distant past, the successes of his
fellow-citizens of the present age would inspire him
with hope and the knowledge that literary achievement
was still possible for modern men (1: 11-12). Thus,
for both Wordsworth and Coleridge, writing education
should introduce young literary hopefuls to their
fellow writers, encouraging them to critique previous
work and think for themselves, but on the basis of
knowledge rather than ignorance of the literary work of
others. This kind of literary independence would be
237
achieved near the end of a lengthy study of existing
texts, not declared before this process had even begun.
The neo-Romantic compositionists, on the other
hand, argue that the educational system is so full of
stultifying conventions that individual students must
be encouraged to seek composing power solely in their
own minds rather than in the texts of others. In
making such radical declarations of individual student
power, each of these theorists uses a different
terminology to describe the hidden power within
students. Macrorie characterizes it as a reservoir of
truth; Coles describes the power as a capacity to
create a writing self. Berthoff, on the other hand,
suggests that written power comes from the student1s
own imagination, while Elbow compares it to an
authentic "voice" and to an electric "juice" or energy
that runs through good writing.
All of these neo-Romantic theories of the writer's
internal power have their root in the Romantic myth of
genius. For example, when Macrorie argues that the
proper aim of writing is to attain truth, he echoes
Wordsworth, who, in the 1802 Preface to Lyrical
Ballads. described poetry in the following terms:
its object is truth, not individual and
local, but general, and operative; not
standing upon external testimony, but
carried alive into the heart by passion;
truth which is its own testimony, which
238
gives strength and divinity to the
tribunal to which it appeals, and
receives them from the same tribunal.
(251)
Wordsworth was arguing that the great poetic genius who
has been prepared by education and reflection to seek
the truth will also be given the words to drive that
truth into his readers’ hearts. Similarly, Macrorie
assures his students that by some mysterious process
”it's truthtelling that does the most to release [the]
language powers" inside writers:
Perhaps when they're telling truths (as
they see and feel them, not as super
humans with absolute truthtelling
powers), they concentrate first on what
they1 re saying and second on what others
will think of it. They may be doing
that because truthtelling puts them on
solid ground. (Telling Writing 7)
Like Wordsworth, Macrorie argues that the search
for truth begins a process that endows the writer with
power. In contrast, the Engfish-ridden student paper
is a form of institutional phoniness, a way of avoiding
the truth. True writing places writers "on solid
ground," engaged in honest exploration rather than an
attempt to manipulate a reader. Consequently, when
students search for truth, their written language
immediately improves: "We find they seldom use cliches
or trite phrases. They seldom waste words. And by
some power that I can't name they're given the
239
specific, telling details that most English teacher
plead for” (7). That is, though teachers may plead for
their students to produce powerful, detailed language,
such language cannot be crafted in response to a
teacher's expectations but must instead be received by
students as they focus on telling the truth according
to their own perspective, rather than meeting the
expectations of others. Wordsworth admitted the value
of studying the textual truths of others; Macrorie,
however, believes that students can plunge into a
search for their own inner truths that will be mediated
only by the neo-Romantic teacher and Macrorie's own
textbook. Surely it could be argued, however, that
literary truth-seeking necessarily involves a complex
interaction between the individual writer and the
previous work of others, particularly when that writer
is inexperienced. Bidding students to trust their own
inner truths is likely to have the undesired effect of
encouraging ignorant and premature egotism.
While Macrorie describes students receiving
linguistic power as they search for truth, Coles argues
that powerful writing comes from developing the
universal human capacity for presenting a "plural I," a
variant of the self created for a given situation.
Coleridge argued in the Bioqraphia that "the man of
genius lives most in the ideal world," having carefully
240
cultivated the mental habit of connecting feelings with
thoughts and images, "to the number, clearness, and
vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an
inverse proportion" (1: 4 3-44). Coles, too, warns
students about naively injecting their private selves
into the papers they write:
I wish to make clear that the self I am
speaking of here, and the one with which
we will be concerned in the classroom,
is a literary self, not a mock or false
self, but a stylistic self, the self
construable from the way words fall on a
page. The other self, the identity of a
student, is something with which I as a
teacher can have nothing to do, not if I
intend to remain a teacher,
fPlural I 12)
Coles offers students little guidance in
undergoing this process of self-creation, arguing that
it must proceed under the control of the individual
writer, free of interference from the reactions of
those around her. His Romantic predecessors also
described writing as a process that helps divide and
restructure the writer's self. But Coleridge and
Wordsworth seem to have believed that only the mature
poetic genius can afford to ignore those around him as
he explores the inherent tensions of his own mind.
Moreover, according to Coleridge, even a mature writer
will discover that his own imagination contains both
subjective and objective principles, for imagination is
241
"one power" that is composed of "two inherent
indestructible yet counteracting forces": "one of
which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity"
(1: 299, 297). Thus Coleridge offers writers no
simplistic advice to "be themselves" or create self-
variants in any fashion they choose.3
Similarly, in The Prelude Wordsworth demonstrated
his own growing awareness of the complex internal
divisions that fuel the writing process. He argued
that it was hindsight that enabled him to appreciate
the contribution made by his divided self to his work:
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit
grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling
together
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes
interfused
Within my mind, should e'er have borne a
part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! (1: 340-50)
To Wordsworth and Coleridge, this process of
creating a self through writing appears to have been no
easy task, certainly not one to be entrusted to a
neophyte. Yet Coles not only leaves his students
essentially on their own in deciding what kind of
242
selves they wish to create in their papers; he also
informs them that rewriting is a process of changing
the self that is put forward in a text, therefore
increasing the number of potential selves that students
possess:
. . . what can be said to have
"happened" in each revision is something
that cannot be described completely
without some reference to the reviser,
at least as we imagine him or her. From
this point of view, the revisers of
those sentences, in changing how they
have put the world together, have
changed their relationship not just to
the world, but to themselves— and not
just to themselves as writers, but to
themselves as more than writers,
fPlural I 291-92)
Writing, then, for Coles, is the student's ability
to institute and guide her own dynamic process of self-
creation and re-creation. Though students may want
help from their teachers or textbook in how to go about
this process, it appears that Coles believes no such
guidance of another person's self-creative process is
possible. Therefore, unless one takes the cynical view
that Coles' students can divine from their writing
teacher and text the kind of self they are supposed to
create, this crucial process seems to be one that they
are to undergo with no greater support than their
instructor's encouragement. In either case, students
are not supposed to decline to create themselves
243
according to Coles' vision. For he admonishes them
that students who refuse to create literary selves are
opting for the safety of themewriting bloodless
"Triumphs of self-obliteration" fPlural I 18).
Unlike Macrorie and Coles, who place truth or
self-creation at the heart of composing, Berthoff
argues that the source of composing power is the
student's own imagination, as it is developed and
realized through written language. Following the
incomplete, pirated theory put forward by Coleridge in
the Bioqraphia, Berthoff describes the imagination as
the central mental function that governs creativity,
cognition, and composition alike. She presents her
pedagogy, therefore, as a deliberate effort to "reclaim
the imagination," rescuing this psychological and
literary concept as a means of describing the
abstracting power of the human mind:
If we can reclaim the imagination,
seeing it as a name for the active mind,
we can use it to think with when we come
to teach writing as the composing
process. Its power lies in the fact
that it makes possible so many fruitful
analogies between writing and all other
acts of mind whereby we make sense of
the world. (Making of Meaning 4)
In Forming. Thinking. Writing. Berthoff informs
students that composing is a basic imaginative process
they already use to understand the world. The
244
composition teacher exists to help students understand
the ways in which written language can help them in
this basic imaginative process:
Students can learn to write by learning
the uses of chaos, which is to say,
rediscovering the power of language to
generate meanings. Our job is to design
sequences of assignments that let them
discover what language can do, what they
can do with language. (Making of
Meaning 39)
Elbow takes this idea a step further, describing
writing teachers as unnecessary encumbrances on student
learning, and he points students toward finding their
own internal source of power without the aid of any
authority other than Elbow himself. According to
Elbow, even inexperienced writers can tap an internal
source of power as they learn to produce a creative
flow of words that is at first unimpeded, not only by
external criticism, but also by the criticism of an
internal censor. As writing is separated into
complementary, distinct processes, Elbow believes that
creation, judgment, and experimental evidence from
readers will alternate and build on one another instead
of getting in each other's way.
Thus, by freewriting texts without editorial
interference, writers can discover a vast source of
internal power that Elbow calls "voice" or "juice."
Whereas Wordsworth argued that the genius can through
lengthy preparation learn to discern the natural
principles of art, Elbow holds that these natural
principles are available to anyone who can escape self-
criticism long enough to make a connection with an
internal source of natural power. He maintains that a
writer's voice is her "natural way of producing words,"
and all too often that voice has been "damped out by
all the interruptions, changes, and hesitations between
the consciousness and the page." But, when unleashed
by freewriting, this voice can generate enormous
creative energy, for it is "the main source of power"
in a writer's work (Writing without Teachers 6). Elbow
advises students that voice is innate and individual,
the "sound of 'them'" that "most people have in their
speech but lack in their writing" (Writing with Power
288). Like genius, voice seems to be a mark of
individuality. And, just as eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century writers associated genius with
flaws, Elbow argues that frequently bad writing seems
to go hand in hand with the initial stages of finding a
writing voice: "even though real voice brings
excellent writing when it is fully developed and under
control, it often leads to terrible writing when it is
only just emerging and not yet under control" (Writing
with Power 301).
246
Elbow also compares this internal power to a kind
of "juice":
The metaphor comes to me again and
again, I suppose, because I'm trying to
get at something mysterious and hard to
define. "Juice" combines the qualities
of maoic potion, mother's milk, and
electricity. Sometimes I fear I will
never be clear about what I mean by
voice. (Writing with Power 286)
He suggests that this mysterious composing juice is the
result of the writer's re-creation of experience in her
own mind. Wordsworth described poetic composition as a
process of recollecting, re-creating, and then
distancing oneself from intense experiences (Lyrical
Ballads 260). Elbow argues that powerful writing comes
when an author actually reinhabits experience:
you have to put all your energy into
seeing— into connecting or making
contact or participating with what you
are writing about— into being there or
having the hallucination. And no effort
at all into searching for words. When
you have the experience, . . . you can
just open your mouth and the words that
emerge will be what you need. (Writing
with Power 325)
Wordsworth described the poetic process as
requiring careful training and control; Elbow argues,
however, that even a young writer can recreate
experience with sufficient immediacy that the words of
a text will come magically to her mind without the need
for conscious artistry. Elbow describes the ability to
represent experience as a kind of sexual union with the
other: "the essential act in experiencing something is
wholly internal: the opening of some slippery gland or
the clenching of some hidden muscle to allow a full
participation between one's self and the object (or
event or experience or sensation)1 1 (325). Elbow
appears to believe that such "full participation"
between the self and the external world is both natural
and possible, despite the difficulties human beings
experience in communication. Moreover, instead of
seeing the self as a complex, interactive creation, he
suggests that it is a simple matter to decide where the
individual ends and the outside world begins.
Wordsworth and Coleridge argued that the genius creates
and is created by the process of writing his
experience. Elbow implies that, once a writer— any
writer— has successfully split into generative and
critical halves, the self has a ready means of direct,
unmediated (though mysterious) access to external
reality.
Elbow describes the individual writer as subject
to forces beyond his control as he descends into an
internal arena, freewriting, hoping to write with a
personal and powerful voice, and, at best, producing
texts that surprise him by their "striking integration
248
or coherence.” He believes that any writer who writes
from himself can produce texts that are bound by the
action of the mysterious creative force, containing
words that are linked by an unconscious unity:
They are all permeated by his meaning.
The meanings have been blended at a
finer level, integrated more thoroughly.
Not merely manipulated by his mind, but,
rather, sifted through his entire self.
In such writing you don't feel
mechanical cranking, you don't hear the
gears change. When there are
transitions they are smooth, natural,
organic. It is as though every word is
permeated by the meaning of the whole
(like a hologram in which every part
contains faintly the whole). (8-9)4
In this strongly Coleridgean passage, Elbow argues that
the ideal writing process so intertwines the author,
his experience, meaning, and language that these
elements grow together in the fertile soil of his mind,
though not under his direct control. It is a process
that is available to all who learn to submit themselves
fully to it. Writing classrooms are unnecessary,
according to Elbow, since, once writers have mastered
the techniques of this submission, they need no further
direct instruction in a process that works best when it
is most mysterious.
249
The Anti-Rhetoric of Genius
The third and final legacy of Romanticism still
operating in neo-Romantic composition theories is the
tendency to see writing primarily as a means of self-
expression rather than as a rhetorical tool. Macrorie,
Coles, and Berthoff argue that the major obstacle
preventing students from tapping their internal
resources is the fact that they have been socialized to
view composition as narrowly directed toward an
audience instead of as an expression of their own
creative powers. In contrast, Elbow maintains that
rhetorical concerns should be seen as part of the
editorial phase of writing, when authors take the words
they have generated in private and first criticize
their own texts, then submit them to others to test
their responses.
Elbow has borrowed elements of this argument from
Macrorie, who suggests that students freewrite before
sharing texts with readers. However, Macrorie gives
the impression in Telling Writing that student writers
need not pay much attention to the responses of readers
to their texts. For example, he advises students to
stop writing to please their teachers: "You're being
asked to move far away from Engfish," he tells them,
"and that fearful nervous act of trying to say what
250
teachers said or what they want you to say. Speak for
yourself here" (Telling Writing 24). True, Macrorie
does suggest the use of classroom peer groups in a
"Helping Circle" designed to inform student writers of
the responses of others to their words. But he makes
it clear that such audience responses are the least
important resource available to writers. The primary
resource for a writer is "her own experience (including
thoughts, feelings, and knowledge she picks up from
others)"; next in importance are the student's "skills
as a writer." According to Macrorie, the writer's own
experience and growing writing skills ought always to
take precedence over the feedback given by the peer
group in class, the sole purpose of which is to assist
the student's own efforts "to sharpen and hone those
skills" (73-74).
Moreover, the sample "Helping Circle" presented in
Telling Writing seems designed to demonstrate a means
of facilitating the student's growing authority over
her own text. Interestingly, that text is a personal
narrative about an adolescent clash with parental
authority; unlike an academic argument, therefore, in
which she would be required to submit to the
conventions of university prose, this sample text shows
a student writer who aims at conveying a personal
perspective on her life. The teacher attempts to guide
251
the writer toward being more truly herself, while all
that the other students can offer her is their
contradictory impressions and reactions to her text.
The teacher concludes the circle by telling the class,
"It's up to the writer now" (78). Reader reactions are
to be subordinated to this student's ownership of her
own narrative.
Macrorie describes the roles of writer and reader
in terms of an efficient and seguential division of
labor, so that writers produce texts, allow readers to
respond to those texts, then take control of a process
of revision that may or may not take those responses
into account (79, 83). The teacher in the helping
circle in Telling Writing refuses to allow others in
the group to tell the student what she should do,
restricting them to reporting their own experiences
with the text. But the teacher himself is nevertheless
quite willing to give the class a set of standards they
should use in producing and evaluating texts. Again,
then, the power behind the throne of student control is
Macrorie himself, who sets the classroom standards for
good writing, teaching students the signs of truthful
writing that they should point out to one another.
Naturally, the standard he gives them is his own
direct, immediate, informal style: "Most good
writing," he declares, "is clear, vigorous, honest,
252
alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic,
without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in
sound, economical, authoritative, surprising,
memorable, and light" (31). Though somewhat apologetic
about intruding on the individual writer's authority,
Macrorie nevertheless argues that these basic
characteristics are universal, or nearly universal,
standards of good writing:
You may wonder how I can be so sure what
good writing is. Not everyone likes the
same authors or reporters. When you sit
in the circle of writers and responders
discussed in Chapter 9 of this book,
you'll devise your own standards.
They'll differ somewhat from those of
others in your circle and in other
circles, but probably not on certain
fundamentals. (34)
Clearly, Macrorie's literary standards reflect his
own presuppositions about the innate power that fuels
good writing. If effective prose comes from the
writer's search for truth, then good texts, according
to Macrorie, will evince the writer's rigorous honesty.
He does not inform students that achieving honesty and
directness may be a complex and circuitous matter, for
Macrorie paints human language, emotions, and
motivations in fairly simple terms. By his own
definition, any text that has dishonest or convoluted
intent— a politician's statement, a tall tale, a paper
slyly aimed at meeting teacher expectations— must miss
253
the truth-seeking source of all good writing. Since
the standard is not rhetorical effect but authorial
honesty, it follows that there is no such thing as a
well-written lie. Presumably, even fictional license
must be interpreted as seeking a deeper kind of truth
than surface adherence to fact.
Moreover, Macrorie insists that student writers
can have their rhetorical cake and eat it, too, for he
holds that they will most successfully affect an
audience when they steadfastly refuse to aim their
texts at others. Under the guidance of the neo-
Romantic teacher and textbook-writer, students learn to
write primarily for themselves and allow readers to
follow their lead:
A good part of the time, writers must
sense their readers out there. In a way
they become their own readers while they
write. They talk to a reader and hear
that talk themselves. When you acquire
that knack, readers will come along with
you. (Telling Writing 21)
In Macrorie's vision of the writing process, direct
concern with an audience can only impede rhetorical
effect. But in the midst of a process of honest truth-
seeking, writers may allow themselves to become dimly
aware that someone someday will actually read their
words and that they can represent these potential
readers in their own minds. Therefore, like Wordsworth
254
before them, they can be justified in refusing to
accept any reactions to their works that do not match
their own. Macrorie assures students that power over
an audience comes from freewriting and trust in the
author's own personal truth:
if you write fast— without thinking of
spelling, grammar, punctuation, or
form— and try to tell truths, sooner or
later you'll write something that moves
you and others. Then you'll become more
confident and begin to respect your own
experiences because you realize they're
different from every other person's in
the world— and so the ultimate source of
your power as writer. (Telling
Writing 201)
To Macrorie, as to Elbow, freewriting initiates a
process whereby the author can re-create experience in
a sufficiently complete manner that she can relinquish
intellectual control of her words. Writing is less a
skill for these two theorists than a state of mind
attained through freewriting. As Macrorie explains,
In free writing a person frequently
finds that his pen or typewriter seems
to have taken over the job of writing
and he's sitting there watching the
words go down on paper. A writer should
do whatever he can to help bring about
this state. (158)
By freewriting authors can gain an emotional power over
readers despite the fact that they refuse to aim their
words at an audience:
255
If you can find the feeling that belongs
to a piece of writing you want to
create— your feeling toward the subject
and the persons you’re writing to— then
the composing may be accomplished almost
without your help, and it will be true
in tone, and compelling. (159)
According to Macrorie, ease in writing and rhetorical
power come to writers who learn to ignore both readers
and their own desire for intellectual control.
Like Macrorie, Coles believes that it is in the
neo-Romantic writing class that students can best learn
to ignore readers and write from themselves. One might
expect that in any writing group, the most powerful
person present will exercise a considerable influence
on the others. But Coles argues for a class in which
teacher and students participate as equals in a
"dramatic dialogue," respectfully supporting one
another's individuality without seeking to exercise
control over the texts of others. Hence, according to
Coles, writing teachers should stimulate students to
find their own answers rather than steering them toward
a preset destination: "My function," he tells his
students, "is to ask questions, and if by inadvertence
I should ever chance to tell you something, you should
immediately turn the questioning on me. Whatever
answers you reach in this course, they will be your
own" (13).
256
Despite this pledge, Coles' insistence that his
students find their own answers is itself a subtle
means of pedagogical coercion, particularly when
combined with assignments in a textbook that defines
good writing as self-creation. No educational ideal
will ever change the fact that teachers grade their
pupils, and students who make no attempt to ascertain
their teachers' expectations have not yet grasped this
reality. Thus, Coles' students must learn not to ask,
at least openly, what their teacher wants of them, but
are expected to express a desire to manipulate
assignments to meet their own needs. In The Plural I
Coles reports his response to students who asked him
how to aim their papers at him:
Several students wrote me notes at the
end of their papers: "Sir, it would
help if you could tell us what you
wanted." (To which I responded: "Us?
I can tell you. William, that what I
want of you is what you want for
yourself when you're proud of yourself
for having wanted it. Look back over
what you've written. What, William,
have you ventured?") (34)
What William has ventured, of course, is to try to
unearth Coles' hidden agenda for student writing.
Coles has told his students that he will not require
them to eradicate any trace of self from assigned
"themes," and, indeed, expects them to take personal
control of creating literary selves of which they can
257
be proud. Yet it seems to have been abundantly clear
to William that Coles has merely presented him with a
new and rather confusing set of the guidelines teachers
always impose on student texts. Certainly, Coles would
react most unfavorably to a student who claimed that
her own personal authorial desire was to create themes.
The boundaries of individual selfhood, that is, are set
by the theorist and by the teachers who encourage
students to be themselves and then undertake to judge
their success in reaching this goal.
Coles rejects firmly the alternative to his
theoretical faith in the individual: a rhetorical view
of writing. He argues that such rhetorical theories
trivialize the act of composing, reducing it to a cold
manipulation of text and readers:
when in such a world the focus remains
fixed on the relationship of writing to
its audience without being widened to
include the relationship of a writer to
that writing, the activity becomes ever
increasingly an exercise. . . .
(Plural I 282)
Such a rejection of rhetoric makes sense only if one
agrees with Coles that meaning is purely a matter of
self-discovery. If meaning, however, is a complex
social interaction through the medium of language, the
most meaningful texts may aim at a subtle negotiation
between creativity and expectations, and the writer may
258
choose to manipulate conventions in order to achieve
personal goals or reform those conventions themselves.
Like Macrorie and Coles, Berthoff argues against a
rhetorical theory of language, maintaining that
language enables writers to make internal connections
among their own various cognitive processes. Therefore
she redefines language, dialectic. and rhetoric to
eliminate or reduce their interpersonal connotations,
stressing instead the individual language user.
According to Berthoff, "Language is not essentially
discourse but utterance" (Making of Meaning 109).
True, she admits, "Language is the symbolization of
thought that is always both public and private,
personal and social"; granted, "it is in dialogue that
meanings are created and discovered and shaped."
Nevertheless, she holds that the most fundamental
dialogic interaction occurs within the writer's own
mind as the imagination makes connections between
thought and language.
Similarly, in Forming. Thinking. Writing Berthoff
informs students that she uses dialectic "to name the
mutual dependence of language and thought, all the ways
in which a word finds a thought and a thought, a word,"
what I. A. Richards's refers to as "a continuing audit
of meaning" (47). By means of such redefinition,
Berthoff encourages students to believe that writing is
259
less a matter of communicating with others than
establishing an internal network of communication among
the various aspects of the writer:
In all its phases, composing is
conversation you are having with
yourself— or selves. since you are
speaker, audience, and critic all at
once. You do the talking, the
answering, and the kibbitzing
[sic]....
Learning to write means learning to
listen in on the inner dialogue. . . .
Learning to write is a way of making
that inner dialogue make sense to
others. (Forming. Thinking. Writing 48)
Berthoff also refuses to use rhetoric to describe
the writer's concern with readers. She admonishes her
students that "Rhetoric is only superficially a matter
of evaluating audience and adjusting tone; it has
deeper foundations that we can discover only insofar as
we develop a philosophy of knowledge, a theory of
imagination" (6). What those "deeper foundations" are
never becomes quite clear. But Berthoff assures
students that concern with an audience is the last and
least important stage of composition. Not
surprisingly, therefore, students who might look
through Berthoff's textbook for help in addressing an
audience would need to turn nearly to the end of the
volume before they found a few remarks on readers in
her section on editing for correctness: "You correct,"
she informs them, "in order to meet the expectations of
260
your readers; unless you follow certain conventions,
they will be distracted from what you're saying."
Berthoff predicts, however, that her independent-minded
students may well be dubious about the necessity of
following conventional standards of correctness rather
than their own hearts:
The idea of correcting goes against the
grain in some people, because so much of
it is a matter of following conventions.
If you are an unconventional person, if
temperamentally or politically you
distrust conventions as symptoms of
authoritarian practices, you will have
to come to terms with this problem, just
as those who are all too willing to do
what is expected have their own problem
to cope with. (Forming. Thinking.
Writing 189)
Berthoff carefully lays out the options she envisions
for students who feel that they are abandoning personal
standards when they submit to conventions of
correctness: they may, indeed, choose to discard
conventions; they may write in modes that do not
require strict adherence to conventional rules; or they
may write for a few supportive readers. But she does
warn them that, regardless of the option they choose,
being true to themselves may lead to a failure in
attaining some communicative or persuasive goal:
In The Real World, it is a familiar
experience that a report that was
received sympathetically by your co
workers can be torn to shreds by a
261
reviewing committee; that a statement of
protest that you and your co-workers
have researched carefully and which you
are certain will change hearts and minds
will be read by others with
consternation, contempt, disbelief, if
it is read at all. (189)
In passages like these, Berthoff shares the legacy
of the Romantic myth of genius with her students,
describing the original writer as a hero who battles,
often unsuccessfully, the faulty aesthetic expectations
of readers. Like Wordsworth defending his own
innovations, Berthoff refuses to admit the possibility
that reader reactions may help an author improve a
text, moving toward more imaginative uses of the
communal property of language. Instead, in Berthoff's
neo-Romantic pedagogy, the reader is generally assumed
to be a distraction, rather than an aid, to creativity.
Moreover, like Macrorie and Elbow, she implies that it
is possible for students to resist such distractions,
to write pure expressions that emanate from somewhere
in the writer's mind or heart without a thought being
given to their potential effect on teachers and other
readers. Thus the neo-Romantic opposition to rhetoric
attempts to transform composition into an aesthetic,
self-contained act of expression, resulting in a text
that meets professorial standards, but only because
these natural standards of writing can also be found in
the student's own soul.
262
In contrast, Elbow attempts to reconcile neo-
Romantic expressionism with rhetoric, amalgamating the
two as alternating stages in the process of composing
an effective text. For he sees writing, teaching, and
even thought itself as activities fueled by
contradictory oppositions, including the opposition
between personal expression and social interaction.5
The ideal, according to Elbow, is to give each leg of
such oppositions its due, so that writers, for example,
alternate between complete belief in their personal
authority over texts and a meticulous concern with the
effects of those texts on real readers. Elbow feels
free, therefore, to retain both utter faith in the
mythic power of the author and to balance that faith
with an awareness of rhetorical effect on an audience.
In Embracing Contraries, he argues that keeping such
contradictions alive is essential, and he acknowledges
his intellectual debt to Coleridge:
Since Coleridge there has been a
tradition of using the reconciliation of
opposites as a model for imaginative art
and of calling metaphor a microcosm of
imaginative art. . . . My approach
obviously grows out of this tradition.
But the emphasis is usually on
reconciling, bring together, 'fusing.'
Here I should like to give a bit more
emphasis to the element of
contradiction. (Embracing
Contraries 250)
263
Elbow maintains, then, that oppositions should
whenever possible be kept in a fruitfully contradictory
relationship by alternating between two mutually
exclusive things: doubt and belief, coaching students
and judging them, generating texts and editing them.
From such alternating composing processes, writers find
a voice that will reverberate inside their readers,
even without those readers' conscious consent. This
authorial voice apparently satisfies the contradictory
demands of both self-expression and rhetorical effect.
Elbow admits, "I don't know how it works"; he insists,
however that "this voice is the force that will make a
reader listen to you, the energy that drives the
meanings through his thick skull" (a phrase that rather
nicely illustrates Elbow's distrust of readers)
(Writing without Teachers 6). By echoing Coleridge's
famous ballad, Elbow himself makes clear the Romantic
roots of his idea that writers can learn to mesmerize
their readers,
to be like the ancient mariner who has
the power simply to look the reader in
the eye and start talking and thereby
paralyze her: prevent her from moving
away, compel her to listen, and compel
her to experience everything you are
saying. (Writing with Power 369)
Elbow argues that such rhetorical power comes from
a process of engagement with the self. Like Berthoff,
264
he sees such engagement as kind of internal dialectic:
"Language," he informs his students, "is the principal
medium that allows you to interact with yourself"
(Writing without Teachers 55). But he also insists
that social interaction is a necessary part of this
process, though he continues to subordinate such social
interaction under authorial choice. The writing group,
according to Elbow, takes the writer "out of darkness
and silence" and presents the writer with information
that it is essential she attend to carefully. He
cautions students:
If someone reports something that seems
crazy, listen to him openly. Try to
have his experience. Maybe what you see
is truly there and he's blind. But
maybe what he sees is there too. Even
if it contradicts what you see. . . .
Your position may blind you to what he
sees. Your only chance of trying to
sharpen your eyesight is to take
seriously his seeming craziness and try
to see what he sees. This may similarly
encourage him to try to share what you
see and thereby help make him a better
reader too. (Writing without
Teachers 94)
Elbow is describing an ideal situation in which
writer and readers affect one another and may be said
to participate jointly, though asymmetrically, in
creating a text. The author controls the process but
lets go of the results; she also resolves to treat
contradictory evidence from readers as an experimental
265
resource rather than as evidence of her failure or
theirs. Elbow tells his students—
Don't look to your readers to find out
whether your words are any good. Look
to them to find out about what your
words make happen in real
consciousnesses. The better you get at
feeling how your words affect
consciousnesses, the better you will be
at deciding for yourself whether your
words are any good. (104-05)
Elbow doesn't deal with the sticky issues of trust or
selecting a circle of readers; students might well
finish this writing text unsure how to decide whose
response will be most useful. Apparently, writers are
to learn through trial and error to distinguish between
criticism they want to use and that which they should
discard. They are expected to follow their own inner
light in the teacherless writing group, and also to
follow Elbow's example, enacted throughout his own
text, of using a system that separates writing into a
set of mutually contradictory attitudes, all of which
the writer must retain in order to create a successful
text.
266
Conclusiont Teaching Natural Writers
The word genius has fallen into disfavor as an
educational label, for it disregards the very writing
students who seem to need instruction the most. Neo-
Romantic theorists, however, have democratically
extended the genius myth as a means of discerning and
honoring the innate abilities of all students.
Berthoff, for example, has written that teachers should
"teach to the top of everybody * s sensibility and
capacity" (Making of Meaning 48). Unfortunately,
these theorists have taken the further step of arguing
that such innate powers are so omnipresent, so
trustworthy, that they need little or no direct
instruction once students are aware that they exist and
have had practice in ferreting them out. Neo-Romantic
pedagogies seek to reestablish students' trust in their
own abilities, a praiseworthy goal; sadly, these
pedagogies also try to convince students to disconnect
themselves from the very social interactions that could
do most to develop their writing skills.
Neo-Romantic theories resemble the Wordsworthian
myth in presenting an anti-rhetorical ideal, one that
is necessarily more or less inadequate to describe what
goes on in real-world contexts. Despite the
overemphasis that neo-Romantic theorists place on
267
individual writers, written transactions always involve
a negotiation of power between writer and reader, a
balance between personal creativity and social
judgment. In the Romantic period, this balance was
achieved by the continually opposing forces of
authorial claims and critical evaluation. But modern
neo-Romantic theories admit no natural corrective to
student power other than the power of the theorist who
facilitates individual empowerment. Thus neo-Romantic
compositionists follow Wordsworth in theoretically
negating the rhetorical situations in which individual
writers write.
Wordsworth's strategy was aimed at a specific
rhetorical situation, and he never forgot that his goal
was to control his own literary transactions with
readers. His theoretical inheritors, on the other
hand, claim that this same heroic power already resides
in even the most unpromising of the writing students
that fill modern classrooms. Wordsworth pitted his own
authorial genius against equally powerful critical
adversaries, and his self-promoting statements actually
functioned as a challenge, a means of rhetorical
engagement with his readers. In contrast, neo-Romantic
theorists encourage their students to retreat from such
engagements into their own literary worlds, as if it
were possible to disentangle themselves from the
268
socializing force of language by ignoring conventions
that they barely understand.6
269
NOTES
1. For a review of Wordsworth1s involvement in the
Lancaster-Bell controversy, see R. A. Foakes, "Thriving
Prisoners."
2. This idea that inventive power is a mysterious
external force is neither the creation of neo-Romantic
compositionists nor their Romantic forebears. As
Jacqueline de Romilly and many others have pointed out,
ancient Greek theorists also debated whether the power
of words came from a magical poetic force or from the
art of persuasion.
3. It is fascinating to note that Coleridge's
exposition on the imagination in Chapter 13 of the
first volume of the Biooraphia acknowledged his
intellectual debt to Kant but went on to present the
ideas of Schelling and Fichte as his own. Moreover,
the chapter is cut short by the insertion of a letter,
actually written by Coleridge but purporting to be the
work of a friend who is so stunned by the originality
of these ideas on the imagination that he implores
Coleridge to defer publication of his argument until he
can treat it at sufficient length. According to Engell
and Bate, under the extreme pressure of meeting a
publication deadline that had already been extended,
Coleridge drew heavily on his German sources and
"finessed" his own argument in order to fulfill his
over-ambitious promises in a halfway presentable form
(lvii). That is, Coleridge's famous definition of the
imagination was shaped by the very external pressures
from which he sought to isolate the ideal poetic
genius.
4. Like Coleridge, Elbow describes writing as an
organic process, rather like a plant that grows in the
internal world of an author, suggesting to students
that the organic source of their own creativity is a
force inside that they must learn to use but cannot
coerce: "I advise you to treat words as though they
are potentially able to grow. Learn to stand out of
the way and provide the energy or force the words need
to find their growth process" (Writing without Teachers
24). Elbow does acknowledge that after "growing" a
text, writers must choose the means of transforming and
applying it, a process he compares to "cooking" the
organic plant that has grown inside the writer, and,
reminiscent of Coleridge, Elbow places opposition at
this process. But according to Elbow, "Cooking is the
interaction of contrasting or conflicting material," an
270
interaction that is less like the fundamental
imaginative oppositions envisioned by Coleridge and
more a local matter of opposing ideas, metaphors, or
modes, or even the tension between the writer and the
symbols recorded on paper (49).
5. Before turning to composition studies, Elbow
conducted literary research along similar lines and
published Oppositions in Chaucer.
6. For a discussion of interpretive communities, see
Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts and Is There a
Text in this Class?
271
AFTERWORD
TO TEACHERS
There are indeed modes of teaching . . .
by which children are to be
metamorphosed into prodigies. And
prodigies with a vengeance have I known
thus produced! Prodigies of self-
conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and
infidelity! . . . TTIhese nurselings of
improved pedagogy are taught to dispute
and decide; to suspect all, but their
own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to
hold nothing sacred from their contempt,
but their own contemptible
arrogance. . . .
Coleridge, Biooraohia
When writing teachers consider what to teach their
students on Monday morning, the intellectual history of
their teaching techniques and the theories behind them
may seem irrelevant to the overwhelming task they face.
But understanding the history of composition studies
can help teachers question their own theoretical
perspective. Romantic theories of writing have given
modern teachers one vision of the roles that they and
their students play. Such role-playing will be more
effective as teachers learn how these roles were
created, acted out, and criticized in other contexts.
272
Undoubtedly, beginning writers need to build
confidence in their abilities. But, like the Romantic
poets before them, they must also learn to gauge the
expectations of readers and then decide how many of
these expectations they will try to meet and how far
they wish to draw their readers into uncharted
territory. In addition, as English teachers move from
a nine o'clock survey-of-literature class next door
into their eleven o'clock composition course, they must
be extremely wary of applying aesthetic theories to
students who write papers, not poems, and are evaluated
by the university according to their ability to follow
the conventions of academic discourse rather than their
own free spirits. If students are to become literate
on a college level, they must be willing to seek both
originality and conventional correctness.
In the nineteenth century, the genius myth was
always challenged by Romantic critics, who were
challenged in turn by poets producing unusual works of
art. Thus, despite the myth of authorial dominance,
Romantic writers and readers were forced to collaborate
as they brought original works of art to life. Modern
teachers, too, need to find ways to support their
students' creativity, while also giving them the
experience of having readers respond to and critique
their writing. Perhaps a faith in original genius is
273
necessary if writers are to become bold enough, like
Wordsworth, to risk stretching the limits of
convention, or even to risk generating texts at all.
Yet, certainly, even when professional writers believe
most fervently that they are isolated and impervious to
reader response, the act of using language and genre
forces them into a social arena, where literary
rebellions are staged within an interpretive
community.1 Young writers who are mastering
unfamiliar genres need to be taught to balance faith in
themselves with a willingness to learn from their
readers.
NOTES
1. Stanley Fish makes a strong case for the power of
such interpretive communities in Is There a Text in
this Class?
275
WORKS CITED
Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the
English Poet. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970.
Berlin, James. "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing
Class." College English 50 (1988): 477-94.
. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in
American Colleges. 1900-1985. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century
American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
UP, 1984.
Berthoff, Ann E. Forming. Thinking. Writing: The
Composing Imagination. Upper Montclair, NJ:
Boynton/Cook, 1982.
. The Making of Meaning: Metaphors. Models, and
Maxims for Writing Teachers. Upper Montclair, NJ:
Boynton/Cook, 1981.
, ed. Reclaiming the Imagination: Philosophical
Perspectives for Writers and Teachers of Writing.
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1984.
Berthoff, Ann E. and James Stephens. Forming.
Thinking. Writing. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook, 1988.
Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.
2nd ed. 1785. New York: Garland, 1970.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of
Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Bond, Donald F., ed. The Spectator. 2 vols. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1965.
Bremen, Thilo von. Lord Bvron als Erfoigsautor.
Athenaion Literaturwissenschaft, band 6.
Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1977.
276
Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Bvron's Don Juan; A
Variorum Edition. Cantos I-IV. Ed. Truman Guy
Steffan and Willis W. Pratt. Vol. 2. Austin: U
of Texas P, 1957.
Byron's Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A.
Marchand. 7 vols. London: John Murray, 1976.
Chew, Samuel C. Bvron in England: His Fame and After-
Fame. London: Murray, 1924.
Christensen, Jerome C. Coleridge's Blessed Machine of
Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
. "The Genius in the Biographia
Literaria." Studies in Romanticism 17 (1978):
215-31.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biograohia Literaria.
Ed. James Engel1 and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton UP, 1983.
. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford
UP, Clarendon, 1956-1971.
. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1912.
Coles, William E., Jr. Composing; Writing as a Self-
Creating Process. 1974. N.p.: Boynton/Cook,
1983 .
. The Plural I— and After. 1978. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook, 1988.
Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the
Modern Student. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP,
1971.
Dennis, John. Critical Works of John Dennis.
Ed. Edward Niles Hooker. 2 vols. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins P, 1939.
Duff, William. Critical Observations on the Writings of
the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry.
Being a Seguel to the Essay on Original Genius.
1770. New York: Garland, 1971.
277
. An Essay on Original Genius; and its
Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the
Fine Arts. Particularly in Poetry. 1767. New
York: Garland, 1970.
Dugas, Kristine, ed. The White Doe of Rvlstone; or The
Fate of the Nortons. By William Wordsworth.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in
Learning and Teaching. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
. Oppositions in Chaucer. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 197 3.
. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the
Writing Process. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.
. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP,
1973.
Engel1, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment
to Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981.
• Forming the Critical Mind: Drvden to Coleridge.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?: The
Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1980.
Foakes, R. A. "'Thriving Prisoners': Coleridge,
Wordsworth and the Child at School." Studies in
Romanticism 28 (1989): 187-206.
Fogle, Daniel. "A Compositional History of the
Biographia Literaria." Studies in Bibliography.
Vol. 30. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1977.
219-34.
Fruman, Norman. "Review Essay: Aids to Reflection on
the New Biographia. Studies in Romanticism 24
(1985): 141-73.
Gemant, Andrew. The Nature of the Genius.
Springfield: Thomas, 1961.
Gerard, Alexander. An Essav on Genius. 1774. New
York: Garland, 1970.
. An Essav on Taste. 1759. New York: Garland,
1970.
278
Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1989.
Golden, James L., Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E.
Coleman. The Rhetoric of Western Thought. 2nd
ed. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1978.
Hayden, John O., ed. Romantic Bards and British
Reviewers: A Selected Edition of the Contemporary
Reviews of the Works of Wordsworth. Coleridge.
Byron. Keats and Shelley. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 1971.
Johnson, Edward Dudley Hume. "Don Juan in England."
English Literary History 11 (1944): 135-53.
Jordan, John E. Why the Lyrical Ballads?: The
Background. Writing, and Character of Wordsworth's
1798 Lyrical Ballads. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1976.
Klancher, Jon P. The Making of English Reading
Audiences. 1790-1832. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,
1987 .
Kretschmer, Ernst. The Psychology of Men of Genius.
New York: Harcourt, 1931.
Larson, Richard. "Structure and Form in Non-Fiction
Prose." Teaching Composition: Ten Bibliographical
Essays. Ed. Gary Tate. Fort Worth, TX: Texas
Christian UP, 1976. 45-71.
Lindemann, Erika. "Ken Macrorie: A Review Essay."
College English 44 (1982): 359.
Longinus. "On Sublimity." Aristotle. The Poetics;
"Longinus." on the Sublime? Demetrius. "On Style."
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1932. 462-503.
Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. 4th ed. 1970.
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1985.
. Writing to be Read. 3rd ed. Upper Montclair,
NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1984.
Manning, Peter J. Bvron and His Fictions. Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 1978.
279
. "Don_Juan and the Revisionary Self."
Forthcoming in Romantic Revisions. Ed. Robert A.
Brinkley and Keith Hanley. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992.
Marchand, Leslie A. Bvron: A Biography. 3 vols. New
York: Knopf, 1957.
Mayo, Robert. "The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical
Ballads.» PM LA 69 (1954): 486-522. Rpt. in
Lvrical Ballads: A Casebook. Ed. Alun R. Jones
and William Tydeman. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
79-125.
McFarland, Thomas. Coleridge and the Pantheist
Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969.
McGann, Jerome J. Don Juan in Context. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 197 6.
. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
"Of Genius." Anonymous. Occasional Paper. 3.10
(1719): 3-32. Rpt. in Men. Manners and Critics.
N.p.: Augustan Reprint Society, 1949.
Parrish, Stephen Maxfield. The Art of the Lvrical
Ballads. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973.
. "Dramatic Technique in the Lvrical Ballads."
PM LA 74 (1959): 85-97. Rpt. in Lvrical Ballads: A
Casebook. Ed. Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman.
New York: Macmillan, 1972. 127-56.
Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. Composition as a Human
Science: Contributions to the Self-Understanding
of a Discipline. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Pope, Alexander. An Essav on Criticism. 1711.
London: Scolar, 1970.
. "The Preface to The Iliad." The Prose Works
of Alexander Pope. Ed. Norman Ault. Vol. 1.
Oxford: Shakespeare Head P, 193 6. 221-256.
Pratt, Willis W. Bvron*s Don Juan: The Making of a
Masterpiece. Vol. 1. Austin: U of Texas P, 1957.
Reed, Mark L. "Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the 'Plan'
of the Lyrical Ballads." University of Toronto
Quarterly 34 (1965): 238-53.
280
. Wordsworth; The Chronology of the Early Years.
1770-1779. Cambridge; Harvard UP, 1967.
Reiman, Donald H. The Romantics Reviewed; Contemporary
Reviews of British Romantic Writers. 9 vols. New
York: Garland, 1972.
Romilly, Jacqueline de. Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient
Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.
Rutherford, Andrew. Bvron the Best Seller. Byron
Foundation Lecture. Nottingham: U of Nottingham
P, 1964.
. Byron: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes &
Noble, 1970.
. Bvron: A Critical Study. Edinburgh: Oliver and
Boyd, 1961.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of.
Characteristics of Men. Manners. Opinions. Times,
etc. Ed. John M. Robertson. 2 vols. Gloucester,
MA: Peter Smith, 1963.
Sharpe, William. A Dissertation upon Genius. 1755.
Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1973.
Smith, Elsie. An Estimate of William Wordsworth bv his
Contemporaries. 1793-1822. 1932. New York:
Haskell, 1966.
Siskin, Clifford. The Historicity of Romantic
Discourse. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Smith, Gregory, ed. The Spectator. Rev. ed. Vol 1.
New York: Dutton, 1945.
Steffan, Truman Guy. Byron's Don Juan: Notes on the
Variorum Edition. Vol. 4. Austin: U of Texas p,
1957 .
Trueblood, Paul Graham. The Flowering of Bvron's
Genius: Studies in Bvron's Don Juan. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1945.
Walker, Keith. Byron's Readers: A Study of Attitudes
Towards Bvron. 1812-1832. Salzburg, Austria:
Universitat Salzburg, 1979.
Ward, Herman M. Byron and the Magazines. 1806-1824.
Salzburg, Austria: Universitat Salzburg, 1973.
281
Ward, Jay A. The Critical Reputation of Bvron's Don
Juan in Britain. Salzburg, Austria: Universitat
Salzburg, 1979.
Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-
1950. 1955. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
Winterowd, W. Ross. Composition/Rhetoric: A Synthesis.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1986.
"The Purification of Literature and Rhetoric."
College English 49 (1987): 257-73.
. Rev. of Richards on Rhetoric, by Ann E. Berthoff.
College Composition and Communication 43 (1992) :
88-92.
Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William
Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen
Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940-
1949.
. The Prelude: 1799. 1805. 1850. Ed. Jonathon
Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New
York: Norton, 1979.
Wordsworth, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The
Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed.
Ernest de Selincourt. Rev. Mary Moorman and Alan
G. Hill. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1970.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Lyrical Ballads. Ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones.
London: Methuen, 1963.
Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition: In
a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison.
1759. New York: Garland, 1970.
Young, Richard. "Concepts of Art and the Teaching of
Writing." The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern
Writing. Ed. James J. Murphy. New York: MLA,
1982.
. "Invention: A Topographical Survey." Teaching
Composition: 10 Bibliographical Essays. Ed. Gary
Tate. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1976.
130-41.
282
"Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in
Rhetorical Invention." Research on Composing:
Points of Departure. Ed. Charles Cooper and Lee
Odell. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1978. 29-47.
APPENDIX
A growing number of scholars are working to trace
the roots of the modern composition movement I call
neo-Romanticism. As the broad outlines of this
intellectual history emerge, it is becoming clear that
many neo-Romantic ideas derive from the set of
assumptions about writing that were most powerfully
articulated in the early nineteenth century, both by
English Romantics and by their American counterparts,
including Emerson. This dissertation argues that
modern theorists have inherited the Romantic myth of
genius without the complex theoretical dialectic that
once surrounded it. James Berlin makes a similar
argument about Emersonian rhetoric, which originally
emphasized public discourse but was reduced by its
inheritors to a hymn to self-expression.1 Berlin
suggests Emerson's rhetoric had little pedagogical
influence in the nineteenth century, when writing
instruction in the United States was dominated first by
epistemological rhetoric and later by the so-called
"current-traditional" pedagogies of Adams Sherman Hill,
Barrett Wendell, and John Franklin Genung. This
— 284
"current-traditional" model, which is still a powerful
force near the end of the twentieth century, focuses
almost exclusively on style, coherence, usage, and
grammar at the expense of invention and rhetoric.
Periodically during this century, however, "current-
traditional" pedagogy has been challenged by neo-
Romantic theorists who seek to empower student
authors.2
Neo-Romantic composition theories proliferated
rapidly in the fertile political and philosophical soil
of the 1960s, and they continue to exert considerable
influence today in college, secondary, and primary
writing classrooms. During the 1980s neo-Romanticism
came under the scrutiny of those who were working to
understand the intellectual history of modern
composition theory. Richard Young and W. Ross
Winterowd initially labelled this movement a new form
of Vitalism; more recently, Young has called its
practitioners new Romantics and Winterowd has used the
term Romantic Idealists, more closely linking this
group to certain key Romantic ideas.3 Both Young and
Winterowd describe this Romantic revival as functioning
in opposition to another group of compositionists, one
that Young calls the new classicists and Winterowd
refers to as the New Rhetoricians. Berlin prefers the
oxymoronic label expressionistic rhetoric, which he
285
contrasts with the rival theories of cognitive and
social-epistemic rhetorics ("Rhetoric and Ideology").
In addition, Louise Phelps has compared the theoretical
metaphors used by various compositionists to describe
writing, including the Romantic myth of the natural;
writing as art; and science (Composition as a Human
Science).
Through this growing body of intellectual history
it has become clear that modern composition owes a
sizeable debt to Romanticism. A complete line of
intellectual descent has not yet been (and may never
be) traced, for Romantic assumptions are woven tightly
into the fabric of twentieth century language theory,
aesthetics, politics, and literary criticism. Neo-
Romantic compositionists had to look no further than
their own graduate education in English literature to
find the prevailing theoretical suppositions that have
governed post-Romantic critical studies. Thus it was a
natural step for the theoretical inheritors of
Wordsworth and Coleridge to cast their own students as
genius-heroes who battle the institutional strictures
of American education.
286
NOTES
1. According to Berlin, Emerson was "a serious student
of rhetorical theory" who was regretful that he never
had the opportunity to fill a chair in rhetoric at a
university (Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century
American Colleges 42).
2. Berlin describes at least three of these modern
Romantic revivals. The first was spearheaded by Fred
Newton Scott, Joseph Villiers Denney, and Gertrude
Buck, who combined Emersonian principles with American
Pragmatic philosophy. A second revival took place in
the post-World-War-I Progressive era, when educators
like Adele Bildersee sought to convince teachers to
advise rather than teach their students (Rhetoric and
Reality 77). Then, forty years later, expressionism
resurfaced in the most recent wave of neo-Romantic
theories.
3. See Richard Young, "Paradigms and Problems,"
"Invention: A Topographical Survey" 19-21, and
"Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing" 134; see
also Winterowd's review of Richards on Rhetoric.

Linked assets