Romantic Irony in England

Abstract

As Muecke has pointed out, Romantic irony in Germany was a program rather than an achievement, and the German literature illustrating the theory was not of the richest.¹⁹ English Romantic poetry on the other hand was a magnificent achievement but one whose theoretic base comprehended a good deal more than the new ironic theories and much that was antithetic to them: hence the familiar question of the relevance of irony to that poetry.²⁰ The Romantics in Germany, with the philosophical support of post-Kantian idealism, defined themselves against those powerful and dominating figures, the classicists — Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kant. Writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the other hand, conscious of their own novelty and enthusiastic (for a time) about the revolutionary currents of the age, saw themselves as pioneers and liberators, in both literature and in politics. The greater political freedom and latitude for opinion in England made participation and political writing much easier than in Germany, a fact of considerable importance both to the development of social and political interests and to the nature of the literature. Perhaps the English Romantics really had more in common with Goethe and Schiller than with the self-styled Romantics in Germany, who, in reaction against the robust classicism of their heroic elder contemporaries, favored subtlety, refinement, indirection and paradox.²¹