Romantic Language: the Rise of Object-Dominance

Abstract

When the reaction against Romanticism took place in England in the early decades of this century the principal objection raised against the poets so beloved of the Victorians was not, in the first instance, their excess subjectivity, but their use of language. Critics orientated towards a Marxist reading of social history, did, it is true, take Romantic poets to task for a specifically ‘bourgeois’ subjectivity, but in England, where such a tradition was underdeveloped, the main error of the Romantics was felt to be a certain paucity of verbal texture. I. A. Richards found them largely lacking in irony as a result of a limiting simplicity of language.¹ William Empson admitted that the Romantics ‘were making a use of language very different from that of their predecessors’ — especially the admired Meta-physicals. ‘One might expect’, Empson went on, that they would not need to use ambiguities of the kind I shall consider to give vivacity to their language. ² The poverty which Richards had diagnosed as a lack of ironic complexity becomes, in Empson, an absence of ‘vivacity’, so that the approach to them should be ‘psychological rather than grammatical’ .³