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Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

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M.H. Abrams takes his title from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and though he shines his lamp on that work briefly, for the most part this is a critical study which focuses on the key German and English romantics (philosophers and poets)and certain formal attributes they all shared -- namely a penchant for circular structure (golden age of mans innocence/fall from innocence/redemptive return to the beginning). What is most surprising about this study is how pervasive this circular pattern was in the romantic period. Abrams finds it in virtually every major work of philosophy and poetry in the romantic period. In doing so Abrams does not want to suggest that the romantic movement was any less revolutionary than previously thought but that the movement was a complex one that issued forth great changes in philosophy and literature not so much by inventing new forms but by finding new validity in old forms and patterns.

Abrams argues that from the time of the reformation, literature and philosophy were becoming more and more secular and that the western conception of the universe was becoming more and more "mechanized". In his earlier book Mirror and the Lamp Abrams traced the origins of romantic aesthetic theory and in so doing explained how the romantics reinvigorated art and philosophy by offering an "organic" view of the universe to counter the mechanistic view which made man feel less and less at home and more and more alien in his world. In Natural Supenaturalism Abrams elaborates that argument and shows in more detail just how individual romantics sought to resituate man in his universe. The "revolution" initiated by the romantics was not a political one Abrams argues but a cognitive one. True freedom is attained not en masse according to Blake and Wordsworth but in solitude where one learns to see the world as it is. For Abrams Wordsworth is the penultimate romantic(other romantic scholars find Blake to be the more important figure) because his poems offer man a route to personal salvation through a private communion with nature via the imagination. Wordsworth intentionally weds his own story to the story of mans fall from and eventual recovery of grace-- what is revolutionary is that Wordsworth suggests that man must not wait for the apocaplypse to be redeemed but can find redemption in this world and all by way of the sympathetic imagination. In the Preludes Wordsworth offers his own life story (and his own aesthetic theory) which is the story of one mans attempt to wed himself to nature and thus recover the natural affinity he felt for nature as a child albeit in a higher way with greater awareness. For Abrams it is the central story of romanticism and one that has a continuing influence on literary output. Though each romantic made use of the circular pattern, each did so in his own unique way and for scholars the real interest of the book will be in tracing the genesis and studying the particularities of each cosmogony and there are many offered here(Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche......), (Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt....).

Wordsworth placed a great emphasis on "memory"--for this was the thing that connected him to that first grace he knew in childhood-- in recovering his own version of paradise and so Abrams finds Proust to be Wordsworth's most direct heir. More generally Abrams finds that the circular pattern first found in classic mythology and the bible as well as in that first western autobiography - -St. Augustine Confessions-- continues to be a powerful model for writers as diverse as TS Eliot(Four Quartets) and DH Lawrence to name just two. Abrams finds the romantic rediscovery and revitalization of this circular pattern to be a key aspect of romanticism and the romantic legacy.

A book that takes no account of women writers, ignores Byron (for which NS was later taken to task), and one that simply predated the New Historicism, the mere fact of NS's academic survival is testament to Abrams' giftedness as a writer and the power of his understanding.

Abrams deals with a few very large concepts that were important to the Romantic poets in England and Germany (most especially Wordsworth--the concept of the life-cycle in the Prelude and the Prospectus to the Recluse, for instance). These concepts are close-read out of key passages from the poets, then backgrounded in contemporary philosophy and biblical study. Abrams' title, borrowed from Carlyle, with whom he also deals, suggests the largest thesis of his book: that Romanticism was an assimilative movement--one that incorporated, in secular form, Judaeo-Christian ideas and ideals. He extends this definition of Romanticism to Stevens and Proust, thereby redefining Romanticism's legacy as well. The Kunstleroman--the growth of the artist's mind--is, for Abrams, the great secularized Biblical "high argument" of the early 19th century, and one thinks almost immediately of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as the literary heir to this Romantic innovation.

Along the way there is much talk of circles and spirals and patterns, and the book's agenda is itself incorporated into its structure--a manipulative move, perhaps, and a critically antiquated one, but it does make for enjoyable and easy reading. The same cannot be said for many of the landmark works of Romantic criticism that followed--and while those works must be read, and NS must therefore be relegated to the category of "old school" criticism, this book will continue to withstand paradigm shifts in humanities research because it is one of those rare works of scholarship that's actually fun. Read with an eye to more recent trends in literary criticism, but do read.

Who seek th'discerning intellect of Man
Will find in Abrams' bosom all they can:
His prose is great, citations do abound,
His breadth of knowledge surely does astound.
He takes Will Wordsworth's cloudy, blankest verse
And from this sow's ear weaves a pretty purse.

So deftly he employs his lit'ry crafts
The poets find themselves to be surpassed.
Selective is his skilled assimilation
Resulting in a "reinterpretation"
Eliminating those who do not fit
(Of graphic arts and music - none of it)
We're left with mostly Wordsworth and his fans,
Ignoring others' complicating hands
(Though Coleridge's work does not induce such schism)
He makes them speak for all Romanticism.
So armed with samples highly exclusivic
He thus reveals the genius of the critic.

(Don't get me wrong - his book's a lovely read,
Quite positive, without invective screed.
His passion'd love for certain poems is clear,
But rather sharply limited, I fear.
Sir Alfred and Sir Walter find we not
Although Romantics were both Tennyson and Scott.)

At times, howe'er, his narrowness of views
Make me suspect I'm taken by some ruse:
Of the "Prospectus", he asserts with force
"That Bard, of course, is Milton." No recourse
To alternate interpretational views;
"That Bard" is he whom Abrams had to choose
To make his theory work; he fits his data
(Like Mind to Nature), eliminates errata,
And citing reams of poetry
Dismisses any ambiguity.

His take on history runs a sim'lar course:
Divergent views are killed without remorse.
With Greek and Christian minds made uniform,
He hides all deviation from the norm.
It's not that I dispute his general claim
That Christian history's more or less the same
But it's a prized, elitist train of thought
That pulls his argument to where it's got.
Augustine, Bacon, Milton, Carlyle, Blake -
These dead, white European men all make
Their case: the Bible's great events are turned
Within each man's own life, thus Heaven's earned.
Until at last the secular's displaced
All Christian sense and faith; these leave their trace
In history and apocalyptic views
That Wordsworth and his coterie re-use,
Refracted by Romanticism's prism,
Into Natural Super-Natur'lism.

The plight of modern man's another thing
About which Abrams makes Will Wordsworth sing.
Divided man (from nature, men and self)
Must be brought by the poet back to health.
In part this problem is an old division
By sex, which calls for a Redemptive vision.
Thus Abrams labors to squeeze what sex he can
From him, who was a rather sexless man.
Yet Abrams knows the perfect texts
Of metaphoric metaphysic sex.
Of the Occult in Abrams, we can find
He has a quite accommodating mind.
Kabbalah helps articulate the theme
That "union" is not quite what it might seem;
Instead it's truly something greater
Than machinations of some guy's prostator.
Thus is Will's lack of "getting some" Redeemed,
"Ein ewig Nichts" becomes the godhead beamed
Into the sex-starved life of Will and friends
Transformed into sublime and happy ends.

`Tis odd, I note, that all this stuff is read
In silence, poems are jailed in one's head;
The sensuous joy of linking tongue to ear
Negated - there is nought a whisper for to hear.

And what of this insanely rash endeavor?
Perhaps I'm simply being far too clever?
To write critiques in rhyming (doggerel) verse,
`How could it', you might think, `get any worse?'
But this is Our High Argument: we must reclaim,
Romantically, the poet-artist's name;
Permitting not the critic's mal-possession
Of artistic Laurels gained by supercession.
Prosaic criticism dies. Now see,
Hear, taste, and touch this sweet illumined poetry!

In his pioneering study 'The Mirror and the Lamp' M.H. Abrams contrasted the view of Literature which holds up in mechanical fashion a mirror before reality, and the Romantic Literature of organic overflowing Light. Here he takes a further close look at the Romantic movement and takes as his starting point the movement's most prominent representative Wordsworth. Wordsworth is taken to be the figure who outlines and reveals the program of a redemptive Romanticism. The Paradise of youth, which then knows its Fall into Experience will find its redemption and renewal in the New Paradise. Abrams traces how this religious language of redemption is secularized and made a program for Poetry. It is not in some other world but in this world that the visionary gleam will return to, magnified. Abrams takes as subject the major English writers Blake, Coleridge, Shelley and shows how they shared a common broad perception of the Redemptive process. Abrams true traces the basic ideas through the Literature to modern representatives like Proust and Wallace Stevens. He shows the way ideas matter in Literature.
Abrams write in a clear but to me profound way about the whole background to this Romanticism, which includes a brief but rich analysis of the Confessions of Augustine.