Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

by M.H. Abrams

In this remarkable new book, M. H. Abrams definitively studies the 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 the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the 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 the age.


But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the 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 the 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.

Genres: Romanticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Criticism, Literature

554 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. In a powerful contrast, Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was usually understood as a mirror, reflecting the real world, in some kind of mimesis; but for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.

Abrams was born in a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession, so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy." After earning his baccalaureate in 1934, Abrams won a Henry fellowship to the University of Cambridge, where his tutor was I.A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received his Masters' degree in 1937 and his PhD in 1940. During World War II, he served at the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard. He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. As of March 4th, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.

Reviews

[Quirkyreader]

Ok, for this book you need to have a background in Christianity, Biblical Studies, German Philosophy, Deutsche, and lastly the English Romantic Movement. With a special focus on William Wordsworth.

When I selected it from the library I was lead to believe that is was going to be about Southey, Coleridge, Hunt, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelly, Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Boy, was I ever wrong. There was no mention of Dorothy Wordsworth or Leigh Hunt, and there was a very small blurb about Mary Shelley.

The tittle of this book should have been, "Bildungsroman And Kunstlerrman: Philosohy In Germany And How It Influenced The Romantic Movement".

I'm glad that I did read it because I came away with some German Romatic authors to read and it makes me appreciate E.T.A Hoffman even more.

[Varad]

A complex, difficult, yet richly rewarding book. Abrams' thesis is simple enough: the failure of the French Revolution, and with it the collapse of hopes for a reformation of society, stimulated the chief figures of romanticism to turn their gaze inward and strive instead for the transformation of the soul. One of the main ways this was accopmlished was through the secularization of what had formerly beein chiefly theological modes of thought: hence the notion of "natural supernaturalism." This brief description hardly does justice to Abrams' mastery of the literatures of English and German romaticism, including poetry, prose, and philosophy. The book does become repetitive after the first 350 pages (given that they wrote on common themes, towards the end one has already encountered a particular theme several times already). Yet Abrams may be excused on the grounds that only such comprehensiveness can yield an accurate assessment of romanticism.



Published Friday, 15 June 2012

[Bill Wallace]

This is primarily a book about Wordsworth's poetry and the evolution of his ideas, but there are extensive digressions into the work of other romantics, Coleridge, Blake, and assorted German philosophers and writers. In the course of examining the work of these men, it paints a vivid picture of the evolution of thought from the old, religious way of viewing the world to a humanistic one, and lays the foundation for most of the literature, drama, and popular entertainment that follows for the next 200 years. The fundamental transformation of a world view is an awesome thing and Abrams does a great job of guiding the reader to understand some fairly profound shifts in the perception of the world and the way literary writing depicts it.

The other strong current here is an examination of the profound impact of the French Revolution, specifically its descent into the Terror, on the developing notion of mankind free to pursue his own destiny. The disillusionment of Wordsworth and his peers affected their work and turned its potential influence in a sobered direction, both lighter in ambition and darker in tone. Abrams also makes a pretty good case for Marxism being an outgrowth of tempered Romanticism as much as it is an economic philosophy.

It's not part of his thesis but the book also supports my belief that virtually all genre fiction as well as most modern "serious" literature owes its existence to the Romantics. The voyage to discovery of the mind, free from god, makes possible tales of deduction, scientific exploration, and adventure in a nature that is a protagonist or antagonist in its own right. My own favorite genre -- horror, weird tales, ghost stories -- is a direct descendant of Romantic thought, often twisted and always haunted by the older specters of ruined faith.

[Davvybrookbook]

I love this book thoroughly. While finishing long and complex works like this feels like an accomplishment, the progression across so much information is far too challenging to summarize in a brief summary or review.

Therefore, what I can say is that this work examines Wordsworth first, and his Prelude. This is the centerpiece of his literary analysis, to which he mentions Joyce wrote to his brother “calling it a work of genius.” The autobiographical structure of Augustine’s Confessions, and Milton’s Paradise Lost are the immediate predecessors to Wordsworth. I can also see the Romantic ’circuitous journey’ of a beginning starting in the ending, or rather the ending prefacing the beginning is the entire structural premise of Finnegans Wake. Which to me, this was the most amazing aspect of understanding the subtle “Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature.” Now I see FW is heavily Romantic, where I had once place Joyce in line with Goethe (yes a Romantic too) and Dante, but he is also a Wordsworthian. Now, after completing my first literary work by M.H. Abrams, I found, too, his classic, The Mirror and the Lamp in a used bookstore in Kingston, Ontario.

This is a definitive work on the Romantic Era, and I was surprised how many works I had previously read, and others that I can only recall through their authors and/or titles. Works that prepared me to connect to the work were The Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust I & II, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, some of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, as well as nearing the completion of Byron’s Complete Works, to which Abrams says he is not a Romantic (probably because Byron mocks the Romantic’s self-indulgent focus on autobiography.)

Works that I am now open to reading are Wordsworth’s Prelude, Keat’s Endymion, Holderlin’s Hyperion, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and many more. I love that this work converges on the English and German Romantics. I reread Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” during this read and found it so much more discernible. Hanging the bones of the Albatross around his neck? What a wild wonder of an idea, what guilt this sailor felt for killing the harbinger of his companions’ salvation. Rather like Odysseus he lead them further astray by cursing a symbol of the divine; lost again at sea…and for what?

Abrams defines the Romantic mind as its own harbinger of a new age. The Spring following the destruction of the Enlightenment by the evisceration of a belief in Humanism as a direct result of the horrors experienced in the French Revolution. This period represents a horrific Winter of death and decay within the greater circle of history. The new Romantic vision of history treats time as symbolic stages, of growth, maturation, and decline. Comparably, individuals are no longer static human beings, but are Human Becomings. This is the era when childhood is reimagined as a phase of growth, and thus also a moment when seeing is “freed” of the weight of the past. A time when hope, joy, imagination, and lightness pervade the mind and its view of nature. “The child is the father of man,” as Wordsworth famously writes. The experiences of the child lead to the maturation of man, which becomes essentially a new definition of a type of novel, the Bildingsroman. I am fascinated by the Romantic moment, and largely by its immensity despite its brevity. I think it keeps on living within us and society far longer than might be strictly defined. In many ways, the growth of universal education out of the Napoleon era and our understanding of the mind and nature as imbued with a dynamic potential of becoming is a cornerstone of our entire world.

[Thomas]

I wish more academic writing were of this caliber. The breadth and depth of this study of European Romanticism is truly incredible. Particularly insightful is Abrams' treatment of how Romanticism arose. Rather than simply stating that it was a secularization of Christian thinking or a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, he describes in detail the subtle transformation that this worldview takes in literature and philosophy. Attributes of the Christian God become immanent parts of nature. Pagan classical thought is incorporated as well. The metaphysics that emerges is one of Mind and Nature, and desire to reconcile the two.

This book is essential for anyone studying early nineteenth-century European thought. Of course, if I had my preference, Abrams would emphasize the German component of this movement. But to his credit, he treats Romanticism as an international movement, both English and Continental, and his survey is truly majestic.

[Eric Marcy]

If you have any sort of interest in the Romantic period you owe it to yourself to read this book. Abrams' work is phenomenal, as he unpacks how the Romantic endeavor attempted to correct what they saw as the errors of the Enlightenment movement, swinging far towards a reductive view of reality. He illuminates how they attempted to preserve the spiritual and experiential essence of the old pagan and Christian traditions, bringing them into a post-Enlightenment society, making them intellectually reasonable but yet still satisfying the human need for spirituality. I have found the book an incredible resource as I conduct my own research on Romanticism, and it has also proved instrumental in forming my own theory that the filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are best understood as performing a similar endeavor in their own context with films like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Star Wars."

[Mir]

This is an excellent examination of the Romantic Movement's connections with and ideas about the natural world, the sublime, etc. However, readers should be aware that it is a pretty monocausal approach and does not deal with other factors relating to Romanticism, so it is not a good choice for introductory reading. Also, it is long and not particularly lively.

[Kristi Siegel]

A required book for a graduate class many years ago. I recall it being grindingly dull and the fact that the professor made no mention of the text the entire semester.

[Keerthi Vasishta]

Kudos to the Man's scholarship. I usually refrain from reviewing Academic books but this is a book of vast knowledge that Abrams accumulated. I often didn't get the point in the first half of the book, though I sort of got it because of my own prior academic background but it comes together nicely in Part II. I must say, sometimes he does soar far and wide, a bit close to the Sun but if you're as high up as you need to be to write something like this, it's fair game.
If there is weakness, it's that the connections and layers of thought Abrams parallels, while self-evident on ocassion, does not always translate into the cohesive narrative he thinks is being woven. There are 8 fantastic thesises and parallels in the Romanticisms, Theology and Literature of Europe *and North America. However, I'm not always certain they come together everytime. It feels like a look what is there book, rather than a book which presents deeper windows into either the poetry itself or the ideas they present. It's amazing to think about but the underlying historic context, which Abrams himself purpots often remains curiously absent a lot, replaced instead by a deep textual threads of thought. As a reader, I don't really care much about that because for me the breadth and scope of information, beyond anything else presented, was in itself worth delving into.

[Juliana]

An excellent, elegantly written discussion of Romanticism and its philosophy - both its internal philosophy and its engagement with the broader philosophical movements and currents of the time. Very thought provoking. I think Abrams overstates the extent to which Romanticism draws on Christianity…

[Sarah]

Interesting ideas about key ideas in Romantic literature

[Jordan]

Like its partner, THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP, a masterpiece of scholarship....

[Patrick]

A pleasurable read on the English Romantics. Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott. The good ones.

[Benjamin Mancais]

A lot of atheists say they respect the metaphors of the bible but often can’t back up why. This book shows in all its glory the baby we threw out with the bath water when we retrospectively secularised the text. Natural supernaturalism does a tremendous analysis of the biblical structure and explaining its recontextualisation into the romantic tradition as well as its contemporary philosophies, most notably Hegel. If anyone plans on reading Jung’s “answer to Job” this work does a brilliant job (pun intended) in laying the foundations for what certain biblical themes represent, Eden = childhood, Fall = burden of responsibility etc. Would highly recommend.

[Kristi]

A dense and challenging, yet rewarding academic text, providing a close reading of European Romanticism from its roots in both Classicism and a Biblical worldview, as it was transformed into a secularized philosophical and literary mode that coincided with political and social revolution, I would not recommend this book to a reader new to the study of European Romanticism, as it is rather specific and deep in its exploration, and assumes the reader can already swim soundly and with familiarity in the deep fathoms of this topic; this is a long and imposing academic text; yet, it is an astounding, eloquent, and respectable piece of scholarship.

[Lysergius]

Sympathetic at least.