Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism

Rating:
Summary: Formal Charges
Review: In this meticulously argued book, Susan Wolfson pursues two distinct but closely related projects: a defense of formalist criticism and an argument about Romantic poetry's awareness of the formal conventions in which it participates. While both projects are fully developed and expertly argued, the second is a result of the first, an example of the insights that might follow from the evolved formalism Wolfson outlines in the book's introduction and brief afterword. The first project, therefore, most immediately commands our attention. Wolfson's defense of formalism also commands our attention because of its courage and polemical fervor. In the contemporary critical climate, the formalist critic receives little respect, viewed by its most generous detractors as retrograde and by its harshest as reactionary and inimical to social progress. The title of Wolfson's book, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism, slyly alludes to the outlaw status of the formalist critic. Formalism's stained reputation can, no doubt, be attributed to the excesses of its most influential and controversial incarnation, New Criticism; but, as Wolfson notes, New Criticism is not the whole story of formalism. Despite attempts by later theoretical modes to move beyond formalism, form has proven tenacious, if only because form defines the object of study. While it has persisted, formalism has also been severely weakened as critical attention has shifted from the intricacies of poetic formings of language to the social and historical contexts in which works are produced. If Wolfson's title alludes to the outlaw status of the formalist critic, it also suggests that form is the "charge" or obligation of the literary critic, a charge to which criticism of the last twenty years has been derelict in attending. In her introductory chapter, "Formal Intelligence: Formalism, Romanticism, and Formalist Criticism," in which she provides a thorough account of the interwoven careers of formalism and Romanticism, Wolfson takes aim at the anti-formalist reactions that have leveled the most serious blows to formalist theory and practice. These reactions can be generally classified under the rubrics of deconstruction and New Historicism. While deconstruction was certainly a potent force in the dissolution of formalism's hold on critical practice, it has too been supplanted, leaving the now-dominant New Historicism as Wolfson's most formidable opponent. Under the umbrella of New Historicism, one finds such familiar figures as Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson as well as others, such as Terry Eagleton and Pierre Bourdieu, who are usually classified in other categories. Uniting this disparate group of theorists is an interest in the ways in which literary form resolves social contradictions on the level of aesthetic experience. There are two main objections that Wolfson has to this account of literary form. First, the historicist declares a healthy suspicion of aesthetic forms that mask and that are complicit with prevailing ideologies, thereby liberating himself or herself from the "forms of fetishism" (Bourdieu's phrase) that manacled and blinded the New Critic. But, as Wolfson notes in a consideration of Bourdieu's "Censorship and the Imposition of Form" in the book's afterword, this method only replaces a fixation on literary form with a fixation on social form: "What is curious about these stories is the way the (purported) New Critical reification of aesthetic form, overtly despised, returns as a more pervasive ideological formation. This is still formalism, shifted from aesthetic agency to social determination" (229). While the consideration of Bourdieu's essay is fair, it is noteworthy that other arguments in his oeuvre-arguments that support Wolfson's theses-are left unexplored. In his anthropological writing, such as Outline of a Theory of Practice and Distinction, Bourdieu has seemed willing, at least in theory, to grant some agency to the object of study and to divest the critic (or, in the case of these works, ethnographer) of some of his or her interpretive authority. This directly relates to the second objection that Wolfson has to New Historicism's interest in "resolvable form" and its corollary emphasis on organic form in its treatment of the Romantics. By viewing aesthetic form as the site where historical and social contradictions and conflicts are resolved, critics like Eagleton and McGann afford form no agency in the critique of culture. Only the critic is allowed the opportunity to address the contradictions that literary form is alleged to resolve. Form itself can only register these contradictions when it ruptures or collapses. Attention to the devices of form, in this anti-formalist account of its workings, becomes an empty, almost tautological gesture. For Wolfson, this view is myopic and incites her most vituperative remarks about New Historicism's regard of form: "Too many readers today accept Eagleton's marginalizing, simplifying, or simply dismissive attention to poetic form as a labor of 'reductive operations,' an exercise 'preoccupied simply with analyzing linguistic devices'" (19). The bold labeling of Eagleton's approach as "simplifying" and "dismissive" is atypical in an otherwise even-handed treatment and is perhaps attributable to the sentence's emphasis on readers. If contemporary readers cause the strongest response in Wolfson, the response seems to be motivated by a genuine fear that attention to form will continue to atrophy as a generation of critics and scholars who reached maturity without a rigorous formalist background continue to pursue social context over poetic event. Although Wolfson strenuously challenges several forms of anti-formalist reaction, she ultimately does not dismiss them entirely. New Criticism's one unforgivable sin in these pages is its ahistoricism. In a brief consideration of Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn, Wolfson argues that anti-formalist critics and New Critical practitioners "usually elide a dialectic with historicism" that Brooks gestures toward (6). Wolfson's project seems determined to foreground this dialectic. One could argue that the "refreshed formalism" for which she argues is actually a refreshed historicism. Indeed, one of the ironies of the book is that the most compelling and far-reaching chapter, the introduction, is one that historicizes formalism rather than enacts the formalism it advocates. The refreshed formalism for which she argues is relatively and intentionally under-theorized. Wolfson proposes a focus on "poetic practices" and "poetic events," which are defined as "those stanzas, verses, meters, rhymes, and the line" (3). Focusing on these events in the performances of Romantic poetry, Wolfson contends that "Romantic poems reflect on rather than conceal their constructedness (not only aesthetic, but social and ideological)" (14). On the surface, this thesis shares much with Stuart Curran's now seminal Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986). But, by focusing on the particular and local event instead of broader issues of genre and reception theory, Wolfson distinguishes her contribution from Curran's. She offers her formalism as a "theory in action," a decision that may leave some readers wishing for more theoretical development but one that saves her from making the types of totalizing claims she seems determined to resist. In the six chapters that follow the introduction, Wolfson deploys the unarticulated theory in thorough, highly original considerations of each of the canonical Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley.

Rating:
Summary: Formal Charges
Review: This is a wonderfully argued work, combining a defense of formalist criticism with an erudite argument about British Romantic poetry's awareness of the formalist conventions in which it participates. The readings of the five canonical Romantic poets--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, and Shelley--that Wolfson executes here are highly original and compelling and are certain to affect future considerations of the works about which she writes. Perhaps more far-reaching is her introductory chapter, "Formal Intelligence: Formalism, Romanticism, and Formalist Criticism" which provides a detailed account of the interwoven careers of historicism and formalism in the Anglo-American literary critical tradition. The discussion in that chapter is sure to be useful to students of literary criticism for years to come.