Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Norton Library (Paperback))

I learned more about Romantic Literature from this book than from others on the market. It's a learned, dense and challenging book that requires multiple readings by non-specialists to enjoy its fruits. Some of the negative reviews I have read online are from people who shrink from the challenge of a complex, and difficult book. No matter what they say--they quit and are angry about being dwarfed by Abrams's erudition.

M.H.Abrams is one of the most brilliant aesthetic philosophers of all time. As a visual artist intrigued with the romantic revolution in art, Abrams perfectly traces the evolution of modern aesthetics. Both in this book and his "The Mirror and The Lamp", Abrams takes us to the source of artistic genius and creates a map for all artist to follow forever. Rick Schwab

Abrams has given us an extremely lucid and insightful examination of the deeply spiritual basis of the romantic sensibility, which focused almost exclusively on the close associstion between nature and a spiritual connection to all of life. This is one deep and joyful book. Don't miss out on the insights Abrams has to offer. Get your copy and read it today.Now, let's see, where did I put my copy...? About time for a reread....

Came in great condition.

Who seek th'discerning intellect of ManWill find in Abrams' bosom all they can:His prose is great, citations do abound,His breadth of knowledge surely does astound.He takes Will Wordsworth's cloudy, blankest verseAnd from this sow's ear weaves a pretty purse.So deftly he employs his lit'ry craftsThe poets find themselves to be surpassed.Selective is his skilled assimilationResulting in a "reinterpretation"Eliminating those who do not fit(Of graphic arts and music - none of it)We're left with mostly Wordsworth and his fans,Ignoring others' complicating hands(Though Coleridge's work does not induce such schism)He makes them speak for all Romanticism.So armed with samples highly exclusivicHe thus reveals the genius of the critic.(Don't get me wrong - his book's a lovely read,Quite positive, without invective screed.His passion'd love for certain poems is clear,But rather sharply limited, I fear.Sir Alfred and Sir Walter find we notAlthough Romantics were both Tennyson and Scott.)At times, howe'er, his narrowness of viewsMake me suspect I'm taken by some ruse:Of the "Prospectus", he asserts with force"That Bard, of course, is Milton." No recourseTo alternate interpretational views;"That Bard" is he whom Abrams had to chooseTo make his theory work; he fits his data(Like Mind to Nature), eliminates errata,And citing reams of poetryDismisses any ambiguity.His take on history runs a sim'lar course:Divergent views are killed without remorse.With Greek and Christian minds made uniform,He hides all deviation from the norm.It's not that I dispute his general claimThat Christian history's more or less the sameBut it's a prized, elitist train of thoughtThat pulls his argument to where it's got.Augustine, Bacon, Milton, Carlyle, Blake -These dead, white European men all makeTheir case: the Bible's great events are turnedWithin each man's own life, thus Heaven's earned.Until at last the secular's displacedAll Christian sense and faith; these leave their traceIn history and apocalyptic viewsThat Wordsworth and his coterie re-use,Refracted by Romanticism's prism,Into Natural Super-Natur'lism.The plight of modern man's another thingAbout which Abrams makes Will Wordsworth sing.Divided man (from nature, men and self)Must be brought by the poet back to health.In part this problem is an old divisionBy sex, which calls for a Redemptive vision.Thus Abrams labors to squeeze what sex he canFrom him, who was a rather sexless man.Yet Abrams knows the perfect textsOf metaphoric metaphysic sex.Of the Occult in Abrams, we can findHe has a quite accommodating mind.Kabbalah helps articulate the themeThat "union" is not quite what it might seem;Instead it's truly something greaterThan machinations of some guy's prostator.Thus is Will's lack of "getting some" Redeemed,"Ein ewig Nichts" becomes the godhead beamedInto the sex-starved life of Will and friendsTransformed into sublime and happy ends.`Tis odd, I note, that all this stuff is readIn silence, poems are jailed in one's head;The sensuous joy of linking tongue to earNegated - there is nought a whisper for to hear.And what of this insanely rash endeavor?Perhaps I'm simply being far too clever?To write critiques in rhyming (doggerel) verse,`How could it', you might think, `get any worse?'But this is Our High Argument: we must reclaim,Romantically, the poet-artist's name;Permitting not the critic's mal-possessionOf artistic Laurels gained by supercession.Prosaic criticism dies. Now see,Hear, taste, and touch this sweet illumined poetry!

Erudite, interesting and well conceived. Abrams reputation is more than demonstrated by this book.

M.H. Abrams takes his title from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and though he shines his lamp on that work briefly, for the most part this is a critical study which focuses on the key German and English romantics (philosophers and poets)and certain formal attributes they all shared -- namely a penchant for circular structure (golden age of mans innocence/fall from innocence/redemptive return to the beginning). What is most surprising about this study is how pervasive this circular pattern was in the romantic period. Abrams finds it in virtually every major work of philosophy and poetry in the romantic period. In doing so Abrams does not want to suggest that the romantic movement was any less revolutionary than previously thought but that the movement was a complex one that issued forth great changes in philosophy and literature not so much by inventing new forms but by finding new validity in old forms and patterns.Abrams argues that from the time of the reformation, literature and philosophy were becoming more and more secular and that the western conception of the universe was becoming more and more "mechanized". In his earlier book Mirror and the Lamp Abrams traced the origins of romantic aesthetic theory and in so doing explained how the romantics reinvigorated art and philosophy by offering an "organic" view of the universe to counter the mechanistic view which made man feel less and less at home and more and more alien in his world. In Natural Supenaturalism Abrams elaborates that argument and shows in more detail just how individual romantics sought to resituate man in his universe. The "revolution" initiated by the romantics was not a political one Abrams argues but a cognitive one. True freedom is attained not en masse according to Blake and Wordsworth but in solitude where one learns to see the world as it is. For Abrams Wordsworth is the penultimate romantic(other romantic scholars find Blake to be the more important figure) because his poems offer man a route to personal salvation through a private communion with nature via the imagination. Wordsworth intentionally weds his own story to the story of mans fall from and eventual recovery of grace-- what is revolutionary is that Wordsworth suggests that man must not wait for the apocaplypse to be redeemed but can find redemption in this world and all by way of the sympathetic imagination. In the Preludes Wordsworth offers his own life story (and his own aesthetic theory) which is the story of one mans attempt to wed himself to nature and thus recover the natural affinity he felt for nature as a child albeit in a higher way with greater awareness. For Abrams it is the central story of romanticism and one that has a continuing influence on literary output. Though each romantic made use of the circular pattern, each did so in his own unique way and for scholars the real interest of the book will be in tracing the genesis and studying the particularities of each cosmogony and there are many offered here(Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche......), (Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt....).Wordsworth placed a great emphasis on "memory"--for this was the thing that connected him to that first grace he knew in childhood-- in recovering his own version of paradise and so Abrams finds Proust to be Wordsworth's most direct heir. More generally Abrams finds that the circular pattern first found in classic mythology and the bible as well as in that first western autobiography - -St. Augustine Confessions-- continues to be a powerful model for writers as diverse as TS Eliot(Four Quartets) and DH Lawrence to name just two. Abrams finds the romantic rediscovery and revitalization of this circular pattern to be a key aspect of romanticism and the romantic legacy.

I had expected to be giving this five stars, but unfortunately it suffers from the same defect as its better-known predecessor ”The Mirror and the Lamp” in that the central theme is obscured by a pointless display of erudition to the extent that nothing is actually explained. The blurb states that Abrams sets out to show that (some) English Romantic poets were part of an “intellectual tendency which also manifested itself in German Idealism in being a secularised version of religious concepts”. As he notes in the introduction, England and Germany were “the two great Protestant nations” with a history of theological and political radicalism whose biblical culture allowed them to develop “collateral developments of response” to the “great events of their age”. All well and good, but this thesis is never actually pursued; what you actually get is a book on Wordsworth with excursions to the bible and its relationship to literature; the Kabbala; archetypal mythology; German idealism, and which covers writers from Augustine to Ginsberg. (Unsurprisingly, the latter gets short shrift, “Howl” being dismissed as a “strident parody of the Romantic vocabulary of the transforming vision”. Rimbaud gets a look in too, but gets a black mark for using drugs to attain the vision, as opposed to Coleridge and Wordsworth who used them “inadvertently”. Abrams seems to have been unaware of Alethea Hayter’s “Opium and the Romantic Imagination” which is odd, since Hayter’s book was stimulated by Abrams’ earlier “Milk of Paradise”. )Just about everything is grist to Abrams’ mill except, surprisingly, Shakespeare, who only gets four mentions. How can you write a book about how the medieval religious world view was secularised by romanticism and carried forward into our modern world without making him the hinge on which everything turns? Read this by all means if you want a book that explores some very interesting topics, but don’t expect to find the answers to any of the questions it raises.

The book is itself a classic.. So as the condition as per the price is reasonable..

Absolutely marvelous.

Good