Michael O'Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-19-812285- 3. Price: £42.50 ($75).

This fine, readerly book has been out for some months, and has been warmly noticed in several places (including by the present reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement). But it seems to me an important work, and perhaps significant of a gradual shift in the way the professionals read romantic poetry (a shift of which I thoroughly approve); so I have eagerly taken up the invitation issued by the editor of Romanticism on the Net to discuss the book and its moment a little more expansively. To say so is to risk looking ridiculous in a few years' time, but it feels as though the heyday of high-tech romanticist 'History' has passed. Recent big books of historicist criticism have either taken firm action self-consciously to sophisticate their notions of history (like James Chandler's mighty England in 1819), or have called for a new critical contract between contextual purchase and readerly tact (like Paul Magnuson's Reading Public Romanticism). I should not spot the trends too inclusively: one of the most distinguished recent pieces of historically-minded criticism, Nicholas Roe's John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (recently reprinted in paperback by Oxford University Press), does not fit this pattern at all; but then perhaps it comes from a quite distinct tradition. Roe's book achieved its great successes by the deceptively simple method of knowing a huge amount about its subject, much of it the new fruit of long researches, and by offering that accumulated sense of the age and the place in a series of elegant (though quite unprecious) narratives: their power to absorb was the perennial power to absorb of any world thoroughly and finely re-imagined. The total effect was not unlike the best kind of historical fiction or drama, in that it made Keats all the more real for locating him so convincingly in a milieu so markedly different from our own. Such kinds of accomplishment seem very alien to the more theoretically-driven historicisms of the last fifteen or twenty years; for the paradoxical effect of many of them has been to bleach out much sense of such particularised pastness. McGann, in his now famous Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983), had stressed the importance of realising the differentness of the romantics from us, and this was (I think) extremely salutary, although hardly new, being entirely in keeping with the tradition of contextual 'placing' latterly kept up in distinguished works by Marilyn Butler and others. The dog that McGann put in the manger, or so it seems to me, was the concept of 'ideology': an important part of the argument was that the romantic brand, which became for many critics the ideology, persisted right down to the present day, inflecting our readings with its idealist habits. McGann fought hard to separate romantic 'work' from romantic 'ideology', as though championing the improving virtue of labour, but the distinction collapses in most of his followers' work, and all literary history from Wordsworth down then becomes a long complicity - a non-history (because nothing significantly alters) of sameness. Historicism turned out to be the enemy of that sense of historical givenness cherished by Trilling in his once-famous essay 'The Sense of the Past' (in The Liberal Imagination) - something that McGann, who once expressed his preference for Allott's edition of Keats because it had more bits of information in its footnotes, could hardly have wanted or expected. No wonder that the eminent historical critic, Howard Erskine-Hill, writing recently about poetry and politics (in The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth), took care to define himself as …