James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane, eds. The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hardback: ISBN 978-0-521-86235-6. Price: $84.99. Paperback: ISBN 978-0-521-68083-7. Price: $24.99

An historicist calling, to gloss romantic poetry with the specifics of history or to find in poetry a conduit for or location of events or ideas from history, all of which has preoccupied our field for about three decades, gives way in this new collection to a far more sophisticated, or should I say fundamental, understanding and query of the poetry/history interrelationship and indeed of poetry itself. Nine of the thirteen chapters in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry follow in their titles a “poetry and x” formulation which could result in a criticism of accretion, in the model of the old-style feminist criticism sometimes described as “Add women and stir.” Add history or ideas and stir. In this crude joining of a poem to something beyond its precinct, the poem doesn’t substantially change. But all the essays in the work before us insist that to add is to transform. Romantic poetry presented again and again as “destabilizing” and “unsettling” notions of itself means that in this generative and engrossing volume we are asked to rethink our subject from the ground up. Without ever saying as much, these essays imply that the focus of criticism ought to turn, in the manner of the great romantic manifestos themselves, to the poem as a site of intellectual, affective, and spiritual writerly choices, all of which suggest the basic intertwining of the aesthetic task at hand with the social, biological, and spiritual facts of the poet’s existence. Gone is the notion of the romantic poem as a container of certain contents, and gone is the corollary that verse, language, and form are classical abstractions that stand waiting to serve a new content. Instead, the prevailing poetics is Coleridge’s “form as proceeding,” which throughout my reading of this book has brought to my mind the following lines from David Antin’s “what it means to be avant-garde”: Gone too is the preoccupation with romantic poetry and “the drama of the lyric subject,” with its often elegiac cast, as if romantic poetry could be described primarily as a Schillerian “sentimental” poetry of (in Arthur Hallam’s word) “reflection” on an experience long gone or only wished for. Instead, almost all the essays indicate a preoccupation with “the circumstances,” even or even primarily at the level of prosody, language, and form. Form here is “living form.” In Allen Grossman’s terms, romantic poetry is more a poetry of “aperture” than of “closure.” This, it seems to me, reflects the spirit of romantic politics and romantic manifestos. These essays take seriously the premise most readers go by that romantic poetry (to generalize about a phenomenon with, of course, many variants) seeks, in the imagery of the French Revolution, to break chains imposed through social institutions of power. Describing convincingly the eighteenth-century drive for standardizing the English language, Andrew Elfenbein shows how poetry becomes an act that refuses such standardizations, at first with pseudo-archaisms (Chatterton) and later with a more subtle playfulness among the standard, the prosaic, and the highly poetic. Within individual poems language can shift sources and registers unexpectedly, meaningfully, and, once one is aware of it, disconcertingly, flaunting any sense of stable or stony correctness by putting words on wing. Something similar is at work in Susan Stewart’s masterful study of meter, rehearsing neoclassic metrics and their rigidification by Urizenic prosodists in order to lay out the varieties of metrical and formal irregularity practiced by the romantics. She introduces Coleridge’s phrase mentioned above, “form as proceeding,” to indicate that behind the metrical chain-breaking lies the poetic intimacy of formal choices with “circumstances.” The romantic poets “created …