The Romantic Critical Thinking: Theoretical Incoherence of a Unitary Movement

Abstract

The rise of the expressive theory of authorship in the literary movement that we call Romanticism radicalised the ideas
that the artist is a genius and the work of art is autonomous from the actual reality as it results from an imaginary universe which
is specific to a certain artist. Romantic emphasis on subjective experience and the disinterestedness of the creative act was also
an aspect of its rejection of the principles of Enlightenment and Neoclassicism. Moreover, although time and place specific and
emerging in connection to French Revolution and Industrial Revolution, the exponents of Romanticism were escapist rather than
rebellious as to attempt the improvement of the social conditions. These are some of the reasons that have made critics regard
Romanticism as an artistic not social movement and be reluctant to speak about a Romantic ideology in Marxist terms
concerning the socio-historical position of literature, especially when referring to the great Romantic literary criticism expressed
in Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and Shelley’s Defence of Poetry. These texts
represent the main concern of the present study, in relation to which the aim of the study is twofold: first, to discern among the
ideas and principles regarding the origin of poetry, its subject-matter and language, the role of the poet, and poetic imagination,
and, second, to present the ways in which these ideas are materialised or not in literary practice, namely in Wordsworth’s Tintern
Abbey and Shelley’s To a Skylark.