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| British Poetry Seminar I |
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Harold Bloom, "The Internalization of Quest-Romance" in Romanticism and Consciousness :Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970.
What allies Blake and Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats, is their strong mutual conviction that they are reviving the
true English tradition of poetry, which they thought had vanished after the
death of Milton, and had reappeared in diminished form, mostly after the death
of Pope, in admirable but doomed poets like Chatterton, Cowper, and Collins,
victims of circumstance and of the false dawn of Sensibility. It is in this
highly individual sense that English Romanticism legitimately can be called, as
traditionally it has been, a revival of romance. More than a revival, it is an
internalization of romance, particularly of the quest variety, an
internalization made for more than therapeutic purposes, because made in the
name of a humanizing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity. The poet takes
the patterns of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative
life, so that the entire rhythm of the quest is heard again in the movement of
the poet himself from poem to poem(p.5).
The movement of quest-romance, before
its internalization by the High Romantics, was from nature to redeemed nature,
the sanction of redemption being the gift of some external spiritual authority,
sometimes magical. The Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination’s
freedom (sometimes a reluctant freedom), and the imagination’s freedom is
frequently purgatorial, redemptive in direction but destructive of the social
self. The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises
within a renovated man, shows itself in the arena of self- consciousness. The
quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is
shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute
preoccupation with self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism, what Shelley
calls the Spirit of Solitude or Alastor, the avenging daimon who is a baffled
residue of the self, determined to be compensated for its loss of natural
assurance, for having been awakened from the merely given condition that to
Shelley, as to Blake, was but the sleep of death-in-life. Blake calls this
spirit of solitude a Spectre, or the genuine Satan, the Thanatos or death
instinct in every natural man(pp.5-6). There is no better way to explore the Real Man, the
Imagination, than to study his monuments: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem;
The Prelude and the Recluse fragment; The Ancient Mariner and Christabel;
Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life; the two Hyperions; Don
Juan; Death’s Jest-Book; these are the definitive Romantic achievement, the
words that were and will be, day and night. |
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Harold Bloom, "The Internalization of Quest-Romance" in Romanticism and Consciousness :Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970.
What allies Blake and Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats, is their strong mutual conviction that they are reviving the
true English tradition of poetry, which they thought had vanished after the
death of Milton, and had reappeared in diminished form, mostly after the death
of Pope, in admirable but doomed poets like Chatterton, Cowper, and Collins,
victims of circumstance and of the false dawn of Sensibility. It is in this
highly individual sense that English Romanticism legitimately can be called, as
traditionally it has been, a revival of romance. More than a revival, it is an
internalization of romance, particularly of the quest variety, an
internalization made for more than therapeutic purposes, because made in the
name of a humanizing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity. The poet takes
the patterns of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative
life, so that the entire rhythm of the quest is heard again in the movement of
the poet himself from poem to poem(p.5).
The movement of quest-romance, before
its internalization by the High Romantics, was from nature to redeemed nature,
the sanction of redemption being the gift of some external spiritual authority,
sometimes magical. The Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination’s
freedom (sometimes a reluctant freedom), and the imagination’s freedom is
frequently purgatorial, redemptive in direction but destructive of the social
self. The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises
within a renovated man, shows itself in the arena of self- consciousness. The
quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is
shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute
preoccupation with self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism, what Shelley
calls the Spirit of Solitude or Alastor, the avenging daimon who is a baffled
residue of the self, determined to be compensated for its loss of natural
assurance, for having been awakened from the merely given condition that to
Shelley, as to Blake, was but the sleep of death-in-life. Blake calls this
spirit of solitude a Spectre, or the genuine Satan, the Thanatos or death
instinct in every natural man(pp.5-6). There is no better way to explore the Real Man, the
Imagination, than to study his monuments: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem;
The Prelude and the Recluse fragment; The Ancient Mariner and Christabel;
Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life; the two Hyperions; Don
Juan; Death’s Jest-Book; these are the definitive Romantic achievement, the
words that were and will be, day and night.
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