Romantic Allusiveness

Romantic AllusivenessAuthor(s): James K. ChandlerSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1982), pp. 461-487Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343260 .

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Romantic Allusiveness

James K. Chandler

Harold Bloom has helped many of us to see that poetic influence is not the straightforward affair we once imagined. Yet who can deny that his effort to revolutionize literary history has been marked by critical ex- cesses? If even the sympathetic reader of Bloom must "confess that a vision as large as Bloom's is a lot larger than I need," then some readers are sure to feel outraged.' In "Bloom's determinedly violent exercises," writes Christopher Ricks, "poets have to be made up to take part in [a] lurid melodrama" in which "critics rail," "effects battle," and "figures of

speech murder."2 Those of us who can find signs of progress in Bloom's revolt against received opinion may wish to apply what his own great precursor Shelley said about a political revolution. Shelley argued that France's newly enlightened and enfranchised citizens would necessarily behave for a time in a way that shows the effects of prior falsehood and tyranny. Indeed, by Shelley's cogent reasoning, "if the Revolution had been in every respect prosperous, then misrule and superstition would lose half their claims to our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive can unlock with the slightest motions of his fingers, and which do not eat with poisonous rust into the soul."3 We may wish, in other words, to explain the violence Bloom and his followers have done to our literary

1. Michael Wood, review of A Map of Misreading by Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books, 17 April 1975, p. 18.

2. Christopher Ricks, review of Poetry and Repression by Bloom, New York Times Book Review, 14 March 1976, p. 6.

3. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London, 1970), p. 53.

? 1982 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/82-0803-0008$01.00. All rights reserved.

461



462 James K. Chandler Romantic Alluszveness

monuments as the inevitable consequence of long oppression under a

hegemonic error. Whatever our judgment of Bloom's accomplishment, however, his

theory of poetry remains essentially a theory of literary influence. And, in this respect, his criticism resembles, far more closely than he would like to admit, a work like The Road to Xanadu, J. L. Lowes' famous study of influences on Coleridge's poetry. Both writers are concerned primarily with the trials and triumphs of Romantic imagination, and both read the Romantic poem as a record of a poet's psychological relations to earlier literature. For Lowes, this process has to do with the creative

amalgamation of a great number of works; for Bloom, it is the creative

struggle with just one or two great poets.4 But neither writer is concerned with the rhetorical use to which the Romantic poet puts the earlier text. Neither is concerned, that is, with literary allusiveness, with the

question of how or whether a poet like Coleridge meant his readers to

respond to an echo in his poetry of some earlier poet's work. Of course, the cases of Bloom and Lowes are not exceptional on this

score. Our tendency is not to read Romantic poetry as alluding to the texts it reminds us of. We think of the Augustans as the authors of what Reuben Brower calls "the poetry of allusion."5 We envision Romantic

poets carrying on their work in reaction to these Augustans and in mysterious awe, whether fearful or admiring, of most other poets- sometimes even of each other. No self-respecting Romantic, it is usually assumed, will deliberately send his reader elsewhere for a meaning to

complement the effect of his own words. If a reader's mind wanders to an earlier poem, that is not the Romantic poet's fault but a matter of accident or perhaps of cruel destiny. The Romantic wants to keep the

poem an intimate affair-just the two of us-and does what he can to

keep his reader's attention on himself. Earl Wasserman's much-discussed essay on "The Limits of Allusion

in The Rape of the Lock" is a good example of criticism responsive to poetic allusiveness. Much of its commentary, like Brower's, is concerned with the practical explication of particular neoclassic allusions: chiefly with

identifying the texts alluded to and with describing how the evocation

4. See J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston and New York, 1927), passim. For examples of Bloom's influence criticism, see virtually any of the work he has done since the late sixties; his theory is best laid out in The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973) and A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975).

5. See Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959), esp. pp. 1-14.

James K. Chandler, an assistant professor of English at the Univer- sity of Chicago, has published work on Wordsworth's poetry and poli- tics and is currently completing a book on the subject.



Critical Inquiry Spring 1982 463

contributes to the purposes or meanings of the alluding text. And, like Brower, Wasserman takes care to distinguish an allusion from other kinds of reminiscence. An allusion is an intentional echo of an earlier text: it not only reminds us; it means to remind us.6 As Wasserman's title suggests, however, he also wants to determine the magnitude of an allusion, the extent to which the context of the echoed passage is to be evoked. Wasserman's own exegetical work in the essay leads him to believe that that extent may be very great:

If this has been an admissible commentary on The Rape of the Lock, it would imply that the mode of existence of Pope's poetry- and probably of many other neoclassic poems--ought to be defined broadly enough to include a creative act by the reader. For it suggests that the reader is not only to appreciate the poet's invention in finding appropriate allusions but is actively invited by them to exercise, within poetic reason, his own invention by contemplat- ing the relevances of the entire allusive context and its received interpretation.... Such literature as this is constituted not only by its own verbal texture but also by the rich interplay between the author's text and the full contexts it allusively arouses, for these allusive resonances are not peripheral but functional to the meaning of the artistic product.'

I find this speculation entirely warranted by the evidence and very valu- able as an account of how we must come to terms with the "inter-

textuality" of Pope's poetry. And Wasserman is surely right, like Brower, in extending his model to include other neoclassic poems and other voices that sounded in what Wasserman informally called "the eighteenth-century echo chamber." Yet both writers assume that the chamber has, for practical purposes, fallen silent by the century's end.

What follows is an effort to test the applicability of Wasserman's Augustan hypothesis to the poetic mode of high Romanticism. This effort should not be taken to imply either that the Romantics simply continue in the allusive mode of the Augustans or that the assumptions that lead Bloom and others to read Romantic poetry as they do are utterly mistaken. I will in fact be arguing quite otherwise. Nor must there be any confusion about Wasserman's conception of the Augustan mode. Some of the language of his summary, for example where he speaks of "the rich interplay between the author's text and the full contexts it allusively arouses," might lead one to liken his work to the criti-

6. The view that a verbal echo must be intentional to qualify as an allusion is widely held. See, e.g., Carmela Perri, "On Alluding," Poetics 7 (1978): 289-307; Perri even makes bold to specify the intentional component in allusion by means of a series of Gricean

speech-act rules. 7. Earl R. Wasserman, "The Limits of Allusion in The Rape of the Lock," JEGP 65

(1966): 443-44.



464 James K. Chandler Romantic Allusiveness

cism now associated with the notion of "intertextuality." For the prac- titioners of this criticism, as Jonathan Culler explains, "to read is to place a work in a discursive space, relating it to other texts and to other codes of that space, and writing is a similar activity."8 Writing and reading a

poem are in this account both acts of "intertextual location," if you will, but the reader of the poem need not concern himself with the aims and circumstances of its writer's "similar activity." The decisive difference between this view and the one Wasserman offers for the Augustans is that Wasserman's is intentionalist and historicist. This shows plainly in his exegetical commentary on the Rape, where his characteristic claim follows the formula: "Pope [expects, invites, prods, wants] his (contem- porary) reader to [discover, exercise his wit on, recognize, see] X in his allusion to such-and-such a text." And to support his claim he repeatedly brings his historical scholarship to bear on questions about "the kind of

ready knowledge Pope demands of his reader" and what "facts [were] known to any serious reader" of the time.9

The "text" is thus not, in Wasserman's practice, socially detachable. He clearly sees Pope's poetry as something Pope does for, and with, specific readers. This fact should mike Wasserman's approach to Au-

gustan poetry attractive to readers sympathetic with the kinds of charges Edward Said and Paul Ricoeur have recently brought against struc- turalist-oriented criticism-that it exalts "code" and "system" at the

expense of "intention" and "event."'o These readers might find it useful to consider how critical response to allusion-allusion understood as an intentional act--can be refined.1" Perhaps some kinds of verbal overlap

8. Jonathan Culler, "Presupposition and Intertextuality," MLN 91 (1976): 1382-83; Culler refers primarily to the work of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva but notes that Bloom himself occasionally sounds curiously like an intertextualist critic.

9. Wasserman, "Limits of Allusion," pp. 427, 429. For a response to Wasserman less

sympathetic than mine, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Char- lottesville, Va., 1974), pp. 12-15.

10. See Edward Said, Beginnings (New York, 1975), and Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Ft. Worth, Tex., 1976). Said writes: "A major criticism of the structuralists is, I think, that the moving force of life and behaviour, theforma informans, intention, has been, in their work, totally domesticated by system" (p. 319). Ricoeur complains that in struc- turalist analysis "events vanish while systems remain," and to recover the "actuality of the event as opposed to the mere virtuality of the system," he calls for a "linguistics of the

message" to replace the "linguistics of the code" (pp. 1-11). 11. There are critics who seek to disavow authorial intention while freely employing

the concept of allusiveness, and it is interesting to examine what becomes of this effort in the recent instance of Michael Riffaterre's The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., 1978). While claiming repeatedly that "the only relevance of poetics is to the text itself, not to the author's intention" (pp. 170-71), Riffaterre insists that "reading is a restrictive process" and that "the text's control is absolute" over the competent reader's reading (pp. 150, 5). This control is especially clear, he suggests, in the relation between what he calls the

"hypogram" in its various forms (the descriptive system of a work, the cliche, the intertext) and those various forms of ungrammaticality (the poetic word, the allusion, the scrambled text) which explicitly or implicitly refer to that hypogram. Thus, on the one hand, we find




between poems will remain forever inexplicable within the terms of historical and intentionalist criticism. Other kinds, however, including cases frequently regarded as least accessible to such criticism (but most interesting for poetic studies generally), prove to be well within its reach. My

Riffaterre dismissing the concept of intention as an evasion on the part of the reader who cannot face the "fact" that the text is only an autotelic exercise:

The interpretation of the significance depends entirely upon the correct identification of the hypogrammatic sentence for which the prepoeticized word has been substituted. The poetic work thus plays the role of interpretant in the reading process, a role the reader rationalizes as a symbol of the writer's intention. [P. 46]

On the other hand, we find him acknowledging that some notion of intention is implicit in the terms he is using: "scrambling and the hypogram it necessarily points to presuppose the presence of an author, an intent on his part to play with another text and stimulate comparison" (p. 150). Riffaterre acknowledges and attempts to resolve his difficulty with one brief remark: "In this particular case, it is at least possible to say--without questioning intentional fallacy in general-that the scrambled text is an icon of intention" (p. 150).

To see why even this hedging suggestion is unacceptable, we must go back to C. S. Peirce, whom Riffaterre cites as the chief source of his terms. In Peirce's triadic system, a

sign signifies an object to an interpretant, and with respect to the first and second terms three kinds may be discriminated: a sign may be an icon, index, or symbol of its object. These relations correspond roughly to resemblance, contiguity, and convention, as can be seen in one of Peirce's clearest summaries of how they work:

An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line. An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as a sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. Such is any utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that significance. [Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York, 1955), p. 104]

Since each of these three is a kind of sign, Riffaterre concedes, in calling the scrambled text an icon, that it is a sign of intention. He needs to make the concession because, as we saw, the notion is implicit in his analysis. And he needs the relation to be iconic so that he can suggest that the sign possesses its signifying character irrespective of the object signified: the object need not exist.

For two reasons, I think that we cannot accept this apparent resolution. First, an icon must resemble its object, and I do not see in what sense it is possible to say that a scrambled text resembles an author's intention. What identifying characteristic of the scrambled text could be said to look like some characteristic of the intention to which it is supposed to correspond? Second, and more important, the kind of allusiveness that Riffaterre sees operating in a scrambled text presupposes an intention that cannot be dispensed with if the allusiveness is to be credited. If it could be proven, for instance, that one of Riffaterre's poet-scramblers could not have read the text he is presumed to be scrambling, nor any text influenced by it-as might be proven by, say, showing a radically mistaken chronology- then Riffaterre's argument about that poem would lose its force, and precisely because the possibility of intention had been removed.

My thanks to Gregory Colomb for helpful comments and bibliography on these issues.




contention here is that the notion of Augustan allusiveness can be used, with certain modifications, to direct attention to important and neglected aspects of Romantic rhetoric. The echo in the nineteenth-century chamber may be muffled, but it is often nonetheless meant to be heard.

1

The poetic mode of high English Romanticism has been described best by M. H. Abrams in his discussion of the "greater Romantic lyric." Abrams' famous essay not only traces the emergence of this distinctive

genre but also offers a statement, one that is now a critical commonplace, of what makes such poems special:

They present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.12

This lyric form is for Abrams the culmination of what Paul de Man calls "the transition from eighteenth-century to romantic nature poetry," a transition which has, as de Man points out, been the object of "the main

interpretive effort of English and American historians of Romanticism." Most observers would agree with de Man, I think, that Abrams' work in this area, along with seminal essays by Wimsatt and Wasserman himself, has been central.

De Man's views are germane here because, in two important essays, he has instituted a critique of this interpretive effort, arguing that it has been blindest on the very issue of intentionality.13 The problem appears

12. M. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," in From

Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965), pp. 527-28.

13. See Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation: Theory and

Practice, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore, 1969), p. 178, and "Form and Intent in Ameri- can New Criticism," Blindness and Insight (New York, 1971), pp. 20-35. I should add that in both essays de Man takes his discussion in a direction very different from mine here.




most clearly not in Abrams' taxonomy of the Romantic species but in his discussion of what makes it important. "The best Romantic meditations on a landscape," he writes, "all manifest a transition between subject and

object in which the thought incorporates and makes explicit what was

clearly in the outer scene."14 As a response to what is represented in the Romantic lyric, this comment is unexceptionable. The trouble is that Abrams seems to be responding less to a representation of action than to what is presumed to be, somehow, "actually happening." He does not

distinguish clearly between experience and the representation of experience. And it is precisely on this point that Abrams is closest to Wimsatt, who, in his earlier essay on this topic, had asserted that the interest of the Romantic nature poem derives from "the activity of discerning a design which is latent in the multiform sensuous picture."'5

A thought that incorporates "what was clearly in the outer scene," "a

design which is latent in the multitude sensuous picture": these formu- lations corroborate de Man's claim that the historians of the transition to Romantic poetry, like many commentators on the poetry itself, have mistaken the poem, an intentional object, for a natural object. It is as if

they have taken literally Matthew Arnold's hyperbolic tribute to Wordsworth: "Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power." The question of intentionality is problematic in the poetry of high Romanticism, but for this very reason we must not ignore it by regarding the works we read as so many rocks and stones and trees.16

What is it in these poems that makes discussion of their in-

tentionality so difficult? In order to answer this question, we must first

recognize that these poems are in some important way about their own

intentionality. A combination of poetic strategies makes this reflexive- ness possible. The first is an enforced identification of speaker and author, though this strategy is not by itself enough to set Romantic poetry apart: one can find a similar kind of identification in Chaucer, Milton, and Pope. Abrams' point about the fact that these poems tend to specify their time and place is pertinent here, for autobiography figures in a far more detailed and personal way in the Romantics than in most of their

predecessors. But the decisively innovative feature of this new poetry is its resort to a fiction of intimate spontaneity and its employment of that fiction to dramatize the speaker's developing self-consciousness about his

14. Abrams, "Structure and Style," p. 551. 15. Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," The Verbal Icon (Lexing-

ton, Ky., 1954), p. 110. 16. Matthew Arnold, "Wordsworth," The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed.

R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960-), 9:53. Oscar Wilde's famous statement about Wordsworth remains the definitive answer to Arnold's: "He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there" ("The Decay of Lying," The Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub [Lincoln, Nebr., 1968], p. 178).




process of thought or composition as that process unfolds. The poem becomes an enactment of the way its own purpose or meaning is dis- closed. The best way to elaborate these abstractions is by example.

Since Coleridge's "Conversation Poems" provide the acknowledged startingpoint for the Romantic mode,17 we might begin with the case of the fine lyric "This Lime-tree Bower My Prison." Coleridge's famous headnote to the poem, which reports the time and locale of the meditation, explains that the poem was written when an accident prevented its author from accompanying his houseguests (Charles Lamb and William and Dorothy Wordsworth) on an evening walk. The poem begins as a

complaint about the "beauties and feelings" Coleridge has lost on account of his injury. The thought of being unable to share with his friends the excursion he has planned for them quietly modulates into a reverie that imaginatively follows the trail his guests are covering on foot. As the travelers, mental and physical alike, reach that inevitable prospect in which all eighteenth-century walks must culminate, the panorama of the

countryside is interrupted by an abrupt shift in perspective:

A delight Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad As I myself were there! Nor in this bower, This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine!'8

We witness here a rush of joy recorded in the same present tense at the imagined excursion but occasioned by that very act of imagination, and we are urged to see this event as unforeseen at the poem's outset. Thus the reverie must be understood as taking a course of which the

poet is unaware as it occurs. The motive of the reverie, hitherto unknown, begins to dawn on the poet as he moves, through two successive tense shifts, into a retrospective survey of his experience of the im- mediate surroundings. Through self-conscious reflection, he comes to understand that the natural influences he describes here, though he had been unconscious of them at the time, induced his act of sympathetic imagination with Lamb and the Wordsworths. The poem now

straightforwardly presents itself as the working out of an intention once

17. See, e.g., Abrams, "Structure and Style," p. 530. 18. "This Lime-tree Bower My Prison," The Complete Poetic Works of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), 11. 43-51; all subsequent references to Coleridge's poetry will be cited by line from this edition and will be included in the text.




hidden, the clarification of a meaning once obscure. It concludes with a summary of this meaning:

Henceforth I shall know That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure; No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, No waste so vacant, but may well employ Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes 'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good, That we may lift the soul, and contemplate With lively joy the joys we cannot share.

[61-69]

This is proverbial wisdom, the kind of lesson that every Sunday-school pupil of Coleridge's day would have learned by heart. The poem gains its peculiar force, however, by insisting on the speaker's initial blindness to this moral sentence and by insisting further that the speaker is the author and that the reverie actually occurred-perhaps even that it is actually occurring-as it is represented here. On the one hand, the poem can work only by virtue of our accession to such implicit demands. On the other, however, the poem is obviously a formal and deliberate representation of this reverie. Coleridge knows where the poem is going and to get it there he employs a form whose conventions date to the reflexive moments in poets like Cowper and Goldsmith, a form with which Cole- ridge had experimented three years earlier in "The Eolian Harp" and had already fully realized in "Lines Written on Having Left a Place of Retirement."19

We get a clearer idea of the factitiousness of this meditative form when we compare "Lime-tree Bower" with the poem Coleridge wrote next in this series of lyrics, "Frost at Midnight," a poem built around temporal categories as its predecessor is built around spatial ones. Like "Lime-tree Bower," this poem opens with a troubled speaker, but his problem owes to the constraints of season rather than of locale: the cold stillness of a February night vexes him with "its strange / And extreme silentness." The film flickering on the fireplace grate triggers a reverie that leads him out of his present time and into another, his childhood, as the reverie in "Lime-tree Bower" leads that speaker from place to place. This reverie, by manifesting an intention obscure to the poet in his musings by the fire, issues in a discovery that gives the speaker hope for the child that sleeps by his side. The child will learn a different and more

19. Although Coleridge worked out his peculiar brand of reflexivity in "The Eolian Harp," this poem employs a facial gesture on the part of the interlocutor to make its pivotal turn and is thus a transitional case.




natural lore than did Coleridge in Christ's Church and thus need fear nothing from the eerie quiet of such nights:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

[65-74]

The similarity of this conclusion to that of "Lime-tree Bower" would be

striking even without the overall structural and thematic similarities: "No plot so narrow, be but nature there" ... "all seasons shall be sweet to thee." Only the categories have changed. For his winter meditation

poem, Coleridge has chosen to employ a form that, as he himself has

already clearly established, offers itself as a record of the author's unconscious processes.

The paradox is emphasized rather than ignored. Those final lines

provide what amounts to a metaphor both for the poem's process and for what issues from it. A secret ministry carries forward toward the revelation of its work (the icicles) to the full consciousness of the reflect-

ing mind (the moon). Yet this metaphor is built into the poem's opening lines-"The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind"-in a way that cuts across the grain of the final lines. The touch of the careful craftsman is just evident enough in this beginning's anticipation of the conclusion to make one think twice about the fiction to which one accedes in the poem, especially in view of its use of the already traditional topos of the correspondent breeze.20 And one could point to

analogous traces of artistry in "Lime-tree Bower."21 Coleridge's poems seem to have it both ways on this question of intentionality, and that is the source of the problem.

To see how this curious poetic mode is handled by another author, we can look briefly at a poem that in its own way follows as closely on the

pattern of "Frost at Midnight" as does "Frost at Midnight" on "Lime-tree Bower." The first verse paragraph of this poem, metrically (and in some

respects thematically) a near replica of "Frost at Midnight," records a series of perceptions:

20. Abrams demonstrates the conventionality of this topos in "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor," Kenyon Review 19 (1957): 113-30.

21. For an excellent discussion of the complex artistry of this and other of the "Con- versation Poems," see Reeve Parker, Coleridge's Meditative Art (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975).




Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur.---Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone.22

"And again I hear. ... I behold. ... I ... view. ... I see": for each of these transitive predicates an object is named (waters, cliffs, plots of cottage ground, hedgerows), and in each case the object calls up some associated thought. The farther we move through this catalog, the more expansive the thought, until we begin to detect that the thought is elaborated at the expense of the object perceived. Consider the fate of the hedgerows: "Once again I see / These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild." Sensory apprehension is followed by sensory release, as perception gives way to personification. Indeed, by the end of the passage not just the individual objects but the entire landscape seems to dissolve before our eyes. The farms become a mass of greenness, while the trees appear to go up in smoke. In these final three and one- half lines, however, the dissolution of the natural forms is answered by a symmetrical process of crystallization. And as the smoke clears, we discover with increasing clarity the image of a human being in human scale-"some uncertain notice," "vagrant dwellers," "some hermit," "the hermit"-an image not itself registered by any of the four reported acts of perception.

Only when we read this opening "description" from the point of

22. Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (1798; London, 1963), 11. 1-23; all subsequent references to this and Wordsworth's other works in Lyrical Ballads will be included in the text.




view of the poem's later development do we discover why it is so constituted. For the speaker, identified autobiographically like those in the "Conversation Poems," goes on to explain that he is much changed since he first came among these hills in 1793, a time when nature was "all in all" to him and her forms were his passion and appetite. Now, in 1798, his vision is tempered by his thought, and his thought is never deaf to the still, sad music of humanity. The opening verse paragraph, as we discover retrospectively, enacts this humanized way of regarding the world, a mode of vision that relinquishes the objects of a landscape in favor of the humanity with which they are properly associated. On some im- mediate level the initial response to the landscape must be seen as casual, not calculated, in order for the poem to make sense, to be coherent within the terms of its own fiction. This response must be understood, in other words, as equivalent to what Wordsworth describes elsewhere in the poem as those "little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love" that are the "best portion of a good man's life" in spite of-perhaps even because of--the fact that they are not consciously willed. At the same time, the symmetries of this poem make it hard to believe about the poem that which we are asked to accept provisionally in our reading of it. The evidence linking this poem to Coleridge's devel-

opment of the "Conversation Poem" also counts against its claims on our

willingness to suspend disbelief: it seems unlikely that Wordsworth could have employed the form of "Frost at Midnight" without knowing what it meant.23

The poet's response to the landscape near Tintern Abbey is to be understood as serving a good intention. If we see the poet as conscious too early of this intention, the trick fails. If we do not identify the

speaker with Wordsworth, the poem loses its force. Yet to accede without

question to the implicit demands required to make the poem work would be to render ourselves somehow unworthy of Wordsworth's care and labor.

When Keats adopts the conventions of such poetry to his own purposes in "Ode to a Nightingale," the notion of trickery actually figures thematically in the drama. The conclusion of that poem, we will recall, is that "the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf."24 What is the cheating to which Keats refers here? It is usually

23. The evidence I have in mind here includes the following facts: that the first verse

paragraph of "Tintern Abbey" is precisely the same length (twenty-two lines, six syllables) as that of "Frost at Midnight"; that both poems use the transition "but oft" to move into the second verse paragraph, which in both cases has to do with urban experience; and that both move toward the conclusion introduced by "Therefore."

24. Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1978), 11. 73-74; all subsequent references to Keats' poetry will be cited by line from this edition and will be included in the text.




identified in a general way-as the effort, for example, to change places or unite with the nightingale. I think a better answer, however, would point more specifically to those verbal tricks that work toward effecting this union in the course of the poet's reverie. One important clue here lies in the lines that occasion the poet's verdict on fancy: ". . . forlorn. / Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!" (70-72). That Keats' dream of escape from himself is broken by a verbal repetition should remind us that such repetition helped to induce it in the first place. Linking stanzas 3 and 4, as the above lines link 7 and 8, is the poet's urgent wish: "And with thee fade away into the forest dim: / Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known . . ." (20-22). This repetition, picked up again in the opening of the next stanza ("Away! away!"), enables Keats to sustain his sense of flight until he reaches the moment of synesthetic surmise that is the poem's visionary center (sts. 4 and 5).

But attentive reading reveals instances of verbal trickery in the poem even before the repetition of "fade away." Here are the opening lines:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,-

That ... [1-7]

That what? What should follow here is clearly some clause like: "That I feel as I do" or "That I say what I have said." Instead, we find, "That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, / ... Singest of summer in full- throated ease" (7-10; my italics). It can be no accident, I think, that the pronouns reversed here refer to the speaker and the addressee with whom, as the poem discloses, he seeks to change places. We find a similar piece of legerdemain in the famous lines that introduce the central vision of the poem: "Already with thee! tender is the night, I And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, / Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays" (45-47). In support of his view that the poem traces a steady decline rather than a parabola in its emotional movement, Wasserman argued that the phrase "Already with thee!" had been misinterpreted by most commentators and that the real stress, despite the metrical emphasis, falls on thee.25 Instead of "Already with thee," which would imply an achieved union with the bird, we would have "Already with thee," which

25. See Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats's Major Poems (Baltimore, 1953), p. 198.




would imply that no such union has occurred. But surely the line is meant to work both ways. Since the union is in both cases imaginative and since, even with the second reading, we may understand that the

poet's imagination is prompted to envision life with or as the nightingale, the ambiguity is another trick in the service of "camelion" poetry.

In Keats' "Ode," then, as in the other examples, the poet's reverie enacts the process through which an unconscious intention-in this case the intention to expose poetic self-trickery through the indulgence of it-is made conscious in the course of the poem's development. To see the speaker setting out to fool himself deliberately would be to deny the

poem its conventions. Yet, despite the pressure to regard the speaker autobiographically, it would be ludicrous to call the poem's verbal crafti- ness evidence of Keats' self-delusion rather than of his poetic ingenuity.

2

The idea of intention at work in these poems has a complex history. Although this is not the place to undertake a genetic account of it, one may safely say that it has one of its primary intellectual sources in Locke's

Essay Concerning Human Understanding and in his announced program to teach his readers how to set themselves at a distance from the workings of the mind so as to observe the way it associates ideas.26 As scholarship in the history of ideas has amply documented, Locke's theory of associationism grew more elaborate in the hands of his successors-George Berkeley, David Hume, David Hartley, Abraham Tucker-and eventu- ally worked its way into the fundamentals of aesthetic and poetic theory.27 By the time of Lyrical Ballads, the empirical psychology was

gospel; Coleridge christened that baby in "Frost at Midnight" Hartley, a name from this new bible. The role of associationism in the Ballads

enterprise itself can scarcely be overestimated. "The principal object ... which I proposed to myself in these Poems," wrote Wordsworth in the 1800 Preface, "was to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement" (Lyrical Ballads, pp. 244-45). And later in the Preface he writes that his "purpose . . . is to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement" (p. 247).

26. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894), 1:25-26; cf. 1:527-35.

27. See, e.g., Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), esp. pp. 93-128; Gordon McKenzie, Critical Responsiveness: A Study of the Psychological Cur- rent in Later Eighteenth-Century Criticism (Berkeley, 1949), passim; and Ralph Cohen, "Asso- ciation of Ideas and Poetic Unity," Philological Quarterly 36 (October 1957): 464-74.




But to see how poetic intention becomes problematic in the associationist view, one need read no further than the Preface itself. Between the two statements of purpose cited above falls a passage in which Wordsworth explains that his poetry should not be confused with the trivial balladry of the day: "From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose" (p. 246). Wordsworth's emphasis on "purpose" may seem odd here, since he has already discussed what he calls the chief reasons that "determined [him] in the choice of his purpose" (p. 244). But this redemptive purpose, though called by the same name, turns out to be very different from rational decision: "Not that I mean to say, that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally con- ceived; but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings will be found to carry along with them a purpose" (p. 246). The relation between these two notions of purpose stands unresolved in the 1800 Preface. Wordsworth never clarifies it, never even addresses it. Thus, in the only extended statement of intention to emerge out of this particular Romantic tradition, the analysis equivocates on the crucial issue, and along much the same lines as in the poetry itself. Such equivocation may simply be inevitable when one tries to make one's intentions a part of one's subject matter.

How does the associationist view of intention affect the question of literary allusion? As it happens, this topic is addressed explicitly in a commentary on Shakespeare published in 1794 by the Cambridge philologist Walter Whiter. The introduction announces Whiter's bold promise to change the course of English criticism by making fuller use of what philosophers had discovered about "the Association of Ideas." These "metaphysicians," he claims,

have supplied us with innumerable examples, which prove at once the extent and the activity of its influence. They have taught us that our modes of reasoning, our habits of life, and even the motions of our body, are affected by its energy; and that it operates on the faculties by a kind of fascinating controul, which we sometimes cannot discover, and which generally we are unable to counteract. ... We have seen the question totally exhausted, as it refers to the general powers of the understanding, and the habitual exercise of the reasoning faculty; but we may justly be astonished that the effects of this principle should never have been investigated, as it operates on the writer in the ardor of invention, by imposing on his mind some remote and peculiar vein of language, or of imagery.28

28. Walter Whiter, A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, ed. Alan Over (1794; London, 1967), p. 59; all subsequent references to this work will be included in the text.




What Whiter promises is nothing less than "a principle, which shall conduct us even to the very mind of the writer, and discover to us the causes and effects of its internal operation, unknown even to himself" (p. 67). In general, Whiter's claims are a good deal less novel than he

imagines: a number of the Anglo-Scot critics of the late eighteenth century-Alexander Gerard, Lord Kames, Archibald Alison, and others-had long been proceeding according to similar assumptions. What is noteworthy about Whiter's work stems from the first conclusion he draws from his "principle": "That as these words and sentiments were

prompted by a cause, which is concealed from the poet, so they contain no intentional allusion to the source from which they are derived" (p. 63). It is here, I think, that the notion of unconscious influence first enters

full-fledged into English critical debate. And just as Wordsworth's associationism forces him into equivocating about his purposes, so Whiter is here forced into predicating the oxymoronic notion of an unintentional allusion. In the poetic practice of Whiter's contemporaries, this oxymo- ron emerges as the intentional representation of unconscious influence. Romantic poets, as I will try to show now, undertake to dramatize themselves precisely as writers who are moved in mysterious ways by the poetry they have come to know best.

The poem that follows "Frost at Midnight" in Coleridge's series of meditative lyrics, and the only one he himself called a "Conversation Poem," is "The Nightingale." Addressed to William and Dorothy, the

poem begins with the usual composition of the scene:

All is still, A balmy night! and though the stars be dim, Yet let us think upon the vernal showers That gladden the green earth, and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars. And hark! the Nightingale begins its song, 'Most musical, most melancholy' bird! A melancholy bird? Oh! idle thought! In Nature there is nothing melancholy.

[7-15]

The observation that the bird is the " 'most musical, most melancholy' " is portrayed as having slipped the poet's tongue. It is obviously not, as the speaker utters it, an allusion to Milton's "Il Penseroso." It is just an idle thought. Indeed, precisely because it is presented as idle, like the

speakers' reveries in "Lime-tree Bower" and "Frost at Midnight," it becomes the occasion for subsequent meditation:

But some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced With the remembrance of a grievous wrong, Or slow distemper, or neglected love,




(And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he, First named these notes a melancholy strain. And many a poet echoes the conceit; Poet who hath been building up the rhyme When he had better far have stretched his limbs Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell ...

[16-26]

Only in the course of this meditation does the speaker evoke the Miltonic context of the line that triggered the meditation. The poet-speaker has

caught himself in a Penseroso response, even though he is not and was not in a Penseroso mood. He unconsciously echoes the conceit because, with Penseroso ambition, he has been building up the rhyme, instead of

stretching his limbs, allegrolike and "of his fame forgetful" (30), beside the brook. The Miltonic categories do not come into play, however, until

after the idle error has been committed. Two facts make "The Nightingale" an especially useful model for

Romantic allusiveness. First, in a footnote, Coleridge specifically refers to line 13 as an allusion to Milton, and, second, the same allusion occurs in a poem Coleridge wrote three years earlier. That poem, "To the

Nightingale," is governed by other, older conventions than those of the "Conversation Poems," and in its case the allusion works unprob- lematically:

SISTER Of love-lorn Poets, Philomel! How many Bards in city garret pent, While at their window they with downward eye Mark the faint lamp-beam on the kennell'd mud, And listen to the drowsy cry of Watchmen (Those hoarse unfeather'd Nightingales of Time!), How many wretched Bards address thy name, And hers, the full-orb'd Queen that shines above. But I do hear thee, and the high bough mark, Within whose mild moon-mellow'd foliage hid Thou warblest sad thy pity-pleading strains. O! I have listen'd, till my working soul, Waked by those strains to thousand phantasies, Absorb'd hath ceas'd to listen! Therefore oft, I hymn thy name: and with a proud delight Oft will I tell thee, Minstrel of the Moon! 'Most musical, most melancholy' Bird! That all thy soft diversities of tone, Tho' sweeter far than the delicious airs That vibrate from a white-arm'd Lady's harp, What time the languishment of lonely love Melts in her eye, and heaves her breast of snow,




Are not so sweet as is the voice of her, My Sara-best beloved of human kind! When breathing the pure soul of tenderness, She thrills me with the Husband's promis'd name!

Though by no means one of Coleridge's best poems, "To the Night- ingale" provides a useful foil that sets off what is distinctive in the "Conversation Poem." At the point where Milton's line occurs in the

ungainly progress of this blank verse, the figure of the melancholy and cloistered bard has already been established. The allusion operates without complication. There is no reflexivity in the allusion because, quite simply, there is none in the poem. Though the poem raises some of the same questions about the nightingale as does the later poem, it raises no such questions about the speaker's intentions. In "To the Nightingale" the speaker does not discover his allusion after the fact; he means it when he makes it.

To see more clearly how allusion functions in this kind of lyric, we

might look at a poem of, in every sense, Wordsworth's declining years, one that can serve as a paradigm. Here are the astonishing opening lines of the untitled poem written to his daughter Dora in 1816:

"A little onward lend thy guiding hand To these dark steps, a little further on!" -What trick of memory to my voice hath brought This mournful iteration? For though Time, The Conqueror, crowns the Conquered, on this brow Planting his favourite silver diadem, Nor he, nor minister of his-intent To run before him, hath enrolled me yet, Though not unmenaced, among those who lean Upon a living staff, with borrowed sight. -O my own Dora, my beloved child! Should that day come-but hark! the birds salute The cheerful dawn, brightening for me the east; For me, thy natural leader, once again Impatient to conduct thee, not as erst A tottering infant, with compliant stoop From flower to flower supported; but to curb Thy nymph-like step swift-bounding o'er the lawn, Along the loose rocks, or the slippery verge Of foaming torrents.29

As Coleridge's echo of "Il Penseroso" in "The Nightingale" is an idle

thought, so Wordsworth's iteration of Samson Agonistes is just a trick of

29. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-49), 4:92-94.




memory. We are to suppose tnat Wordsworth started to speak, or to write, and that Milton's words spontaneously sprang forth--that no allusion is made at the point of utterance. It is only as the speaker reflects on the meaning of his mental slip that the lines begin to have reference to their Miltonic context. This context, I would suggest, amounts to a blending of Samson's circumstances and Milton's. Like Samson in the

opening scene of his drama, Wordsworth fears that he will fail to become the natural leader he is meant to be. However, Samson's lines are addressed to God, not to a human comforter, and hence the role of the

biographical Milton in the allusion. The image of the fate Wordsworth fears is that of the blind bard dependent on his daughter's aide. Taken together, the two components of the allusion suggest that the hidden intention of the poem's first lines is to reveal Wordsworth's anxieties about his role as a father. Understanding this fear by reference to the Miltonic context, Wordsworth is able to overcome it (in a way very similar to his

triumph over self-doubt in the poem to Dorothy eighteen years earlier) and to fulfill his proper destiny.30 The plot of the poem thus reenacts in miniature the plot of Milton's drama.31

3

As Romantic lyricism reflects an emerging doctrine of unconscious association, so Romantic allusiveness reflects a related doctrine of literary influence. Wordsworth's late poem to Dora spells out very clearly what the duplicity of the Romantic mode implies for the workings of poetic allusion, so clearly that our acceptance of the mode's conventions here feels awkward, even silly. Like "The Nightingale," the poem to Dora is a kind of caricature of more representative examples of Roman- tic practice; it is paradigmatic, in this sense, without being typical. The merit of the paradigm must be judged against more typical examples of high Romantic art-that is, by better, more interesting, and more difficult poems. One poem that fits the bill on all three counts is The Prelude, a work that, like the poem to Dora, opens with an echo of famous lines from Milton:

Now I am free, enfranchis'd and at large,

30. The triumph over doubt in this poem occurs when Wordsworth snuffs out the thought of future debility: "Should that day come--but hark! the birds salute / The cheerful dawn . . ." (12-13). In "Tintern Abbey," a similar anacoluthon plays a similar role: "If this / Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! ... / How oft, in spirit have I turned to thee / O sylvan Wye!" (50-57).

31. For a discussion of the poem to Dora that employs it as a paradigm for very different ends, see Leslie Brisman, Milton's Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), pp. 213-15.




May fix my habitation where I will. What dwelling shall receive me? In what Vale Shall be my harbour? Underneath what grove Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream Shall with its murmur lull me to my rest? The earth is all before me: with a heart Joyous, nor scar'd at its own liberty, I look about, and should the guide I chuse Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way.32

The lines recalled here are of course the last four in Paradise Lost:

The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitary way.33

Commentators tend to pursue one of two basic strategies with this extended echo. Some disregard the question of Wordsworth's meaning and discuss it as just another "Miltonism" in The Prelude or else simply compare it to Milton's conclusion. This is, after all, only an indistinct and muffled echo of Milton's lines, and, as the poem to Dora attests, Wordsworth steeped his mind in Milton's writings. Yet because of the

length of the echo, however inexact the quotation, and especially because of the position of the passages it links (at the end of one poem and the beginning of another), some critics are willing to discuss Wordsworth's lines as an allusion to Milton's. Supported by the fact of Wordsworth's more explicit use of Milton to define his epic project in the

Prospectus to The Recluse, these critics will insist that the echo of Milton is Wordsworth's way of showing where his poem stands in respect to Mil- ton's epic, of suggesting, for example, that he is picking up where Milton left off.34 One can refine such an interpretation to take account of Wordsworth's alterations in the crucial line, "The earth is all before me"

(my italics). The changes, one might argue, are strategic. Wordsworth has taken Adam's place (thus uniting the perspectives of narrator and hero), changed past tense (completed history) to present (unfolding pro-

32. Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Selincourt, 2d ed. rev. Darbishire (Oxford, 1959), bk 1, 11. 9-19; all subsequent citations to The Prelude are also from the 1805 version, unless otherwise specified, and will be included in the text.

33. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis and New York, 1957), bk. 12, 11. 646-49.

34. For commentary on the preamble's echo of Milton, see Abbie F. Potts, Wordsworth's "Prelude" (Ithaca, N.Y., 1953), pp. 318-19; Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice (New Haven, Conn., 1960), p. 342; Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1970), pp. 115-16; and Said, Beginnings, pp. 44-45.




cess), and naturalized the abstract (and upper case) World by bringing it down to earth.

Both of these views are right, I would argue, but both are also incomplete. To join them into a better reading of the Miltonic echo, we must first look at them in light of a fact that no one would deny about book 1 of The Prelude-that it is about its own composition or, in the terms I have been using, about its own intentions. Another relevant fact, also I think undisputed, is that the poet's initial effort to begin the poem ends at line 271 in frustration and failure. Not until the poet asks in despair "Was it for this [that I was raised as I was]?" does he fall back into a retrospective, narrative manner that enables the poem to go forward by enabling the poet to learn something about himself. The poem then takes its course, like the Coleridgean lyrics from which it is derived, in a direction the poet could not have foreseen at its start.35 The last fact necessary for understanding the Milton passage is that in the early part of book 1 the poet's excursion through the countryside in quest of a home is metaphorical of his quest for a poetic subject matter. The metaphor turns on what might be called a submerged pun on place, topos, and it calls attention to itself by certain repetitions. Surveying the landscape, for example, the poet says that he is "free as a bird to settle where [he] will" (9), and surveying a catalog of possible topics later in book 1 mentions that he sometimes wishes to "settle on some British theme ... by Milton left unsung" (179-80).36 The necessary implication of this metaphor is that the prospect faced by the poet in the preamble must be viewed as the prospect of the unwritten poem, a literary future in which the poet claims freedom to exercise what is later in the poem called "the ambitious power of choice," that is, to write unencumbered by the literary past. This is the frame of mind in which the poet imagines that he might select a Miltonic theme if he so desires. He only later discovers that it is precisely this sort of egotism, this assertion of rational will, that dooms the poem's first start.

How to read the echo of Paradise Lost should now be clear. The poet-speaker initially portrays himself as newly freed from bondage, poetically unbound. He claims to be confronting a literary prospect as fresh as the one Adam faced at the east gate of Paradise. But this speaker is not a creature capable of absolute self-determination, and what betrays him is that he requires the Miltonic context to make his point. The most salient feature of the Miltonic scene evoked in this poem, then, the fact that Adam and Eve are already fallen as they face that prospect in book 12, comes to the fore only after we have followed the speaker through the correction of his initial point of view.

35. Cf. Abrams' argument about Coleridge's primacy in this form ("Structure and Style," pp. 530-33).

36. I quote line 9 from the 1850 version of the poem.




If Wordsworth's great precursor is Milton, surely Keats' is Shake-

speare, and the best case in point from Keats' work is probably the role of Romeo and Juliet in "The Eve of St. Agnes." Aileen Ward is surely right to call that play "the source echoed most frequently in the poem," but

beyond the verbal echoes we must also consider the curious appearance in the poem of plot elements and character types from the play.37 I quote from stanzas 9 and 10:

Meantime, across the moors, Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire For Madeline. Beside the portal doors, Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores All saints to give him sight of Madeline, But for one moment in the tedious hours, That he might gaze and worship all unseen;

Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss-in sooth such things have been.

He ventures in: let no buzz'd whisper tell: All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel: For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes, Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords, Whose very dogs would execrations howl Against his lineage: not one breast affords Him any mercy, in that mansion foul,

Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul. [74-90]

Douglas Bush has commented on such passages in "The Eve of St.

Agnes": "In writing of young lovers from hostile families Keats could not help recalling Romeo and Juliet. "38 But this claim counts as a resolution of our problem only through the equivocation inherent in the verb "recall." To whose memory is Keats recalling the play, to ours or to his own? Is the passage just a "trick of memory," just so much more evidence (like those stories of the Shakespeare portrait Keats used for inspiration) of Keats' Shakespearean idolatry? Or is it an allusion made to suggest an ironic distance from Shakespeare's more solemn treatment of romantic love in Romeo and Juliet? We find at least a hint of such irony, after all, in the sinking of Porphyro's courtly grandiloquence in stanza 9: "worship ... speak, kneel, touch, kiss-in sooth such things have been."

In suggesting how both answers are true but incomplete in themselves, I should address the objection that "The Eve of St. Agnes" is a narrative, not a descriptive-meditative lyric. To show the continuity of

37. Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York, 1963), p. 245. 38. Douglas Bush, cited in Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Bush (New York,

1959), p. 339.




this poem with the Romantic lyric, one might look to a mediating case like Wordsworth's "Michael," a poem that begins and ends with local

description. The middle phase of the out-in-out process in "Michael"

happens to be a tale that the speaker associates with the locale. Though a narrative, the central section of "Michael" is unmistakably meditative, and we read the poem properly only if we see the recollection of the

shepherd's tale as an internal action motivated by the speaker's sym- pathy. What we find in the "Eve" is the inside narrative of a poem like "Michael," with the initial and final composition of place presumed but not stated. The narrator's otherwise irrelevant attention to the architectural and sculptural detail of the Beadsman's chapel at the start of the poem should alert us to the fact that some chapel is function-

ing here as a kind of enormous Grecian urn on which the speaker makes out a history, a chapel like the drafty old church at Stansted that Keats visited just before he wrote the poem and less than a week after St.

Agnes Eve.39 Such a view accords neatly with the famous assertion which is the

poem's working premise: that "The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found it truth."40 And no other view, I think, accounts for the extraordinary transitions in the poem, such as the one by which we move from the Beadsman in his chapel to Madeline in her mansion. Here are stanzas 4 and 5:

That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft; And so it chanc'd, for many a door was wide, From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft, The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide: The level chambers, ready with their pride, Were glowing to receive a thousand guests: The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Star'd, where upon their heads the cornice rests,

With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts.

At length burst in the argent revelry, With plume, tiara, and all rich array, Numerous as shadows haunting fairily The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay Of old romance. These let us wish away, And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there, Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day, On love, and wing'd St. Agnes' saintly care,

As she had heard old dames full many times declare. [37-54]

39. See Ward, John Keats, for an account of Keats' expedition to Stansted (pp. 244-46).

40. Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 1:185.




Consider the questions begged by the opening line of stanza 5: What argent revelry (since we have heard only of trumpets, not of trumpeters or listeners)? Burst in where (since no alternative setting to the chapel has

yet been presented)? Conventions of narrative action are flouted here in favor of some other principle of organization, one that has its basis in associational psychology. To examine the poem carefully is to discover that such transitions are not exceptional. We find the use of unspecified preposition of location, for example, again in the first lines of stanza 10 and of stanza 23 ("she hurried in").

Such devices sustain the impression of associationist organization in the "Eve" despite the fact that the poem offers no explicit persona, no

first-person singular narrator to whom to attribute motives or ideas. Stanza 5 thus takes on special importance in that it offers the next best

thing, a first-person plural: "These [presumably the argent revelry] let us wish away, / And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there" (where? we ask). This is as close as we come to parabasis in this narrative, but it is close enough to reveal the motive that powers associative movement in the poem-the speaker's desire. Whether to interpret this desire in terms of appetite or love, sex or romance, is a question that depends on one's reading of the seduction scene and that the poem probably leaves unanswered. Still, the hint of parabasis is enough to suggest that what is

really being represented is a literal dramatization of wish fulfillment-or, more precisely, a literary dramatization of wish fulfillment. The self-consciously literary dimension of the speaker's dream, everywhere discernible in the poem, is subtly acknowledged in the simile that purports to convey a sense of the size of the argent revelry: "Numerous as shadows haunting fairly / The brain, new stuff'd in

youth, with triumphs gay / Of old romance." This comparison tells us more about the nature of this crowd than about their number and leaves us with the unmistakable suggestion that agents in this poem enter- come "in"-from an outside world that is, in effect, literary history.

But the spatiality of this metaphor is misleading, for the poem re- sists coherent spatialization at every turn. Characters do not come inside from outside; they are, as it were, always "there." It would be better to say that they come in and out of focus, like figures in a dream. The matter of the dream in this poem is old romances, particularly Romeo and

Juliet. The one Lady to whom the speaker turns is already "there," in other words, because Shakespeare put her there. For this poet-speaker, Shakespeare's drama is a source of influence. We misunderstand what Keats has written, however, unless we come to terms with the poem as a drama about, among other things, poetic influence itself. And to come to terms with the poem in this way is to acknowledge the operation of a

Shakespearean allusion that places the psychological drama in its proper setting.




4

I am suggesting, then, that Romantic allusiveness stands apart from the more straightforward mode of Augustan allusion, on the one hand, and from Romantic examples of poetic influence, anxious or not, on the other. To find a good example of the latter, we need not look beyond the poems considered above. For if Coleridge's "To the Nightingale" provides an example of the way the Romantic poet can allude in the Au- gustan way, the other two nightingale lyrics show evidence of an influence not meant for recognition. Keats' "Ode" does, after all, raise much the same kind of question about literary-minded responses to natural objects as are raised in "The Nightingale," a poem that first appeared in Lyrical Ballads and that was reprinted several times by 1819. One should therefore not be surprised to discover that Keats met with Coleridge a month or so before writing the "Ode" and that the first five topics of conversation, as Keats recalls them, were "Nightingales-- Poetry-on Poetical Sensation-Metaphysics-Different genera and species of Dreams."41 But the fact remains that the poem does not offer any evidence that Keats wanted it to be compared with Coleridge's lyric. If lines 39-40 faintly echo Coleridge, they simply do not offer even the kind of muted signal that one finds in the cases of The Prelude and "The Eve of St. Agnes." In short, the criterion of recognizability is just as important for determining Romantic allusiveness as for determining any other kind, though the threshold is lower for most Romantic poetry; that is, the echo admits of a greater degree of muffling.42

This threshold can be very low indeed if other clues are made available in or around the text. Shelley's Alastor, for example, is graced with an epigraph from Wordsworth's Excursion, published only two years earlier. Its invocation includes the phrases "natural piety" (3), "obstinate questionings" (26), and "the tale / Of what we are" (28-29), and it is published with a sonnet, "To Wordsworth," that criticizes the poet for succumbing to an early metaphorical death that sounds much like the death of the Poet whose story is related in the narrative of Alastor. Thus prepared, one comes to the final lines of the speaker's invocation:

I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns

41. Ibid., 2:88-89. 42. By "signal" I mean roughly what Ziva Ben-Porat calls a "marker" in his "The

Poetics of Literary Allusion" (PTL 1 [1976]: 110). What I am offering here, in effect, is a way of accounting for some cases of what Ben-Porat describes as distortion in the marker.




Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. [45-49]

It would have been impossible, in these circumstances, for Shelley's readers to read these lines without recalling the internalized sublimity of "Tintern Abbey":

I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ...

[94-100]

What to make of the echo is another matter, one embroiled in con-

troversy and too complex to take up here in detail. Briefly, I think

Shelley uses this apparently unconscious echo to implicate his autobio-

graphical speaker, and by extension himself, in the scheme of things deplored in the poem. As a fellow man of genius, Shelley means to reveal his vulnerability to the malaise that befalls Wordsworth and the other

great poets of the age who are echoed in the poem. Alastor thus becomes one of Shelley's earliest but most self-conscious poetic illustrations of a

point he makes several times in his prose: great contemporaries, whatever their doctrinal positions, exert an inevitable influence on a poet's writing.43 Indeed, Shelley's understanding of influence, which Bloom has cited many times since Shelley's Mythmaking, his first book, is itself one of the reasons for thinking of Shelley as Bloom's clearest precursor.

I would not want to give the impression that my discussion has now come full circle back to Bloom's view. For where Bloom wishes to sub- sume the Romantic's intentional craft into the psychology of influence, I have tried to show how the psychology of influence enters the subject matter of the Romantic's craft to become part of what he takes for

granted in his work. I suggested above, and have been arguing through- out, that Romantic lyricism is to the doctrine of unconscious association what Romantic allusiveness is to a related doctrine of influence. Now just as a Freudian critic might argue that hidden intentions govern a poet's very effort to represent hidden intentions, so Bloom might say that the kind of allusion I have described is just another anxious maneuver to be classified under one of his six influence ratios. This is fair enough. Our

approaches do not reveal the same thing about an author or his work. One may, however, want to question the conclusion to which Bloom himself thinks his approach necessarily leads: that poetic struggle is its

43. See Shelley's prefaces to The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound, Poetical Works, pp. 34-35, 206-7.




own end. Such a conclusion is no more acceptable than the one toward which we are urged by the theorists of "intertextuality": "To perceive the text as the transform of another text is to perceive it as the ultimate word game, that is, as literary."44 Certainly for the Romantics themselves the work and play of literary self-reference remains subsidiary to higher purposes, to the social activities properly associated with the idea of poetry: describing, evaluating, and exhorting; lamenting, consoling, and celebrating.

44. Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry, p. 42.



Romantic Allusiveness

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