Review by Choice Review
It has been 50 years since literary criticism focused on poetic form, but Wolfson (Princeton) revives "an historically informed formalist criticism" to deal with the six major British Romantic poets. Arguing that scholars have undervalued textual evidence in their pursuit of new social and political theories, the author pays homage to the new criticism made famous by John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Rene Wellek, and Allen Tate. She demonstrates how Romantic writers negotiated questions about what linguistic and formal variations should be incorporated into new kinds of poetic expression. Wolfson writes that Blake predicted many of the major issues of Romantic formalist theory, Coleridge's use of simile led him to new poetic forms, Wordsworth's many revisions led him to transformations of form, Byron's heroic couplet tested the dominant social and literary forms of his day, Keats's later lyrics showed a "masculine mastery and poetry of self-definition," and Shelley created socially contextualized poetic forms. Wolfson's strengths are comprehensiveness and attention to process; her book includes an excellent introductory chapter on the history of formalism and reviews critical debates that have erupted over how poetry reforms traditional practice. For graduate and research collections. J. L. Thorndike; Lakeland College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
