Preface

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITER;ARY nIEORY in the lifetime of Coleridge was to a

surprising extent the making of the modern c'ritical mind. There were many
important differences between, let us say, Horace's Art of Poetry and the
criticism of Dr. Johnson, but there was also a discernible continuity in
premises, aims, and methods. This continuity was broken by the theories of
romantic writers, English and German; and their innovations include many
of the points of view and procedures which make the characteristic differ~
ences between traditional criticism and the criticism of our own time, in~
eluding some criticism which professes to be anti~romantic.
The primary concern of this book is with the English theory of poetry,
and to a lesser extent of the other major arts, during the first four decades
of the nineteenth century. It stresses the common orientation which justifies
us in identifying a spedfica1ly 'romantic' criticism; but not, I trust, at the
cost of overlooking the many important diversities among the writers who
concerned themselves with the nature of poetry or art, its psychological
genesis, its constitution and kinds, its major criteria, and its relation to other
important human concerns. The book deals, for the most part, with the
original and enduring critics of the time, rather than with the run-of-the-
miJl reviewers who often had a more immediate, though shorter-lived in-
fluence on the general reading public.
In order to emphasize the pivotal position of the age in the general history
of criticism, I have treated English romantic theory in a broad intellectual
context, and I have tried to keep constantly in view the background of
eighteenth-century aesthetics from which romantic aesthetics was in part a
development, and against which it was, still more, a deliberate reaction. I
have described some of the relations of English critical theory to foreign
thought, especially to the richly suggestive German speculations of the age,
beginning with Herder and Kant, when Germany replaced England and
France as the chief exporter of ideas to the Western world. I have also
moved freely in time, going back to the Greek and Roman origins of aes-