Romantic indirection

Paul M. Curtis

pp. 1-22

in: Alan Rawes (ed), Romanticism and form, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

One of the many significant pleasures available to readers of Romantic poetry is the uncertainty of not knowing exactly where one is as one proceeds through a poem. In so many Romantic lyrics, the reader becomes aware that he has become positively ma/adjusted, perhaps even lost, vis-à-vis a poem's beginning, middle and end. Furthermore, and perhaps this is the key to the pleasure, this maladjustment, once appre- hended by the reader, is there to be welcomed rather than resisted. To speak generally of English belles-lettres in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the pleasure of maladjustment is the result of complex changes in the poetical and philosophical attitudes to the sequence of ideas in the mind. The principal source of this pleasure is "indirection", a word used to denote the deliberately dilatory progress through a poem which is particular to the poetry of English Romanticism. If one accepts that the reader is aware of his progress through a poem, even at first reading, then progress must be marked in some manner. Various poetical features such as prosody and rhyme, rhetorical features such as syntax and metaphor, and ideas of form through mythos (plot) serve as markers of progress.