Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

In this remarkable new book, M. H. Abrams definitively studies Romantic Age (1789-1835)-the age in which Shelley claimed that the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth. Abrams shows that major poets of age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of age. But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in period, providing insights into those same two forces in ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.