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In: Essays, Letters & Speeches·British Literature
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This volume assembles a series of essays that aim to map the development of English literary criticism throughout the nineteenth century. The editor, Edmund D. Jones, opens with a statement of purpose, noting that the collection focuses chiefly on general principles rather than on specific book reviews, and that the essays are arranged chronologically. The introductory material situates the period by referencing the publication of Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface as the moment when Romanticism became a conscious movement, then proceeds to list contributions from major poets and thinkers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Mill, and others, culminating with a brief inclusion of American criticism. The contents reveal a blend of original writings and excerpts, such as passages from Biographia Literaria set beside the doctrines they contest, offering readers a panoramic view of the era’s theoretical debates.
The prose reflects the formal, argumentative tone of early‑to‑mid‑nineteenth‑century scholarship, with a diction that is both scholarly and occasionally rhetorical, echoing the very Romantic and post‑Romantic concerns it discusses. Readers who enjoy tracing the evolution of poetic theory, especially those interested in how poets themselves articulated the “Theory of Poetry” after the decline of Neo‑classical rules, will find this collection rewarding. It is particularly suited to students of literary history, scholars of Romanticism, and any avid reader who wishes to engage with the intellectual backdrop that shaped the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, and their successors.
The opening · free to read
The essays here brought together are meant to illustrate English literary criticism during the nineteenth century. A companion volume representative of Renaissance and Neo-classic criticism will, it is hoped, be issued at a future date. Meanwhile this volume may well go forth alone. For the nineteenth century forms an epoch in English literature whose beginnings are more clearly defined than those of most literary epochs. The publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and of Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition in 1800, show the Romantic Movement grown conscious and deliberate, with results that have coloured the whole stream of English poetry and criticism ever since.
The greater part of the present collection deals with general principles rather than with criticisms of individual books or authors. The nineteenth century, having discarded the dogmas and 'rules' of Neo-classicism, had perforce to investigate afresh the Theory of Poetry, and though no systematic treatment of the subject in all its bearings appeared, some valuable contributions were made, the most notable of which came from the poets themselves.
The extracts from the Biographia Literaria are placed next to the Wordsworthian doctrines which they criticize; otherwise the arrangement of the essays is chronological.
American criticism is represented--inadequately, but, it is hoped, not unworthily--by the last two essays.
In the preparation of this volume I have received much valuable help from Mr. J. C. Smith, which I now gratefully acknowledge.
EDMUND D. JONES.
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