Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric :: Essays Papers

Structure and Style in the Greater sentimentalist LyricIn his article Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric, M. H. Abrams whole shebang to fix what constitutes the great Romantic words by turning to the philosophic undertones pervading the lyrical writings of William Wordsworth and more so of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Abramss first task is to define what is meant by the term greater Romantic lyric, a pass water which the critic states in no unbiased way includes some of the greatest Romantic achievements in any form (201). This longer Romantic poetic form is typified by a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting who carries on a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene (201). The structure of the greater Romantic lyric is as follows the poem begins with the poet describing the immediate immanent surroundings, which aspect triggers memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling and leads to a meditatio n whereby the observer achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a honourable decision, or resolves an emotional problem (201). This cycle of completion is often attach by the poem returning bear out upon itself, a culmination rearward to the beginning.The key ingredient in this structure is that it is centered on the quality of the human, for even though Romantic poetry is abundantly rich with descriptions of the natural world, Romantics be humanists above all, describing the outer physical world only as it relates to mans self-reflective condition (202). This accounts for Wordsworths fear that an all-consuming observation of the material world would tyrannize over the mind and imagination (202). But to fully explicate his definition of the greater Romantic lyric, Abrams turns not to Wordsworth but to Coleridge as the main focal point, for Coleridge is its top dog author and innovator, having brought forth the Romantic lyric in The Eolian Harp in 1796, a full two years before Wordsworths Tintern Abbey (204). That Coleridge gives the appellation parley poems to his own lyric poems (which also include The Nightingale and This Lime-tree Bower) reflects for us the Romantics focus on the primacy of the human dimension in the natural world. They are conversational in the sense that the poems involve a dramatic vogue of address to an unanswering listener (206). These poems, then, follow the aforementioned formula of the speaker consider a natural scene, reflecting meditatively on the scene and how it relates to the self, and reaching the rid movement of thought from the present scene to recollection in tranquility, to prayer-like prediction, and back to the scene (206).