Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

The Romantic movement has long been characterized as a violent reaction
against the classicism of the 18th-century Enlightenment, and as a
rejection of the classical rhetorical tradition of Milton and Pope. J.
Douglas Kneale, however, argues that the literary aftereffects of that
tradition are evident in the style and topoi of the first-generation
Romantic poets.

Working from Freud’s depiction of repression as a mental defence
mechanism, Kneale points to the rhetorical figures of aversio and
occupatio as literary reflections of the same movement: putting
something aside, yet at the same time putting it in place so as to
delineate difference. Thus, while there is a movement away from
something, simultaneously there is a movement toward something else.
Romanticism, Kneale asserts, turns away from classical rhetorical
tradition, yet at the same time, in declaring its difference, it returns
to the same tradition, thereby revealing a deep strain of classicism
that reflects a “textual attitude ... that at once incorporates
repetition and difference, occupation and aversion, in a mutually
assured contestation.” Although he is not the first critic to suggest
that Romanticism’s origins and influences, as well as its literary and
rhetorical practices, need to be reassessed, Kneale points out that he
is concerned not just with themes and literary references but with
specific features of genre and rhetoric that reveal what he refers to as
the “after-pressure” of classical rhetorical tradition.

Kneale’s writing is as entertaining as it is informative. He
describes his interpretive task as a “quest-romance” in which he
pursues a literary search for intertextual nodes and rhetorical echoes
in the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Through close readings of both
major, canonical works and lesser-known texts, juxtaposed with readings
of Freud and Longinus, he opens up the texts of the first-generation
Romantics to “the combined forces of literary history and
interpretation,” and offers original readings of both the poets and
their genre. His engaging reconsideration of the long-accepted relation
between Romanticism and the classical tradition contributes
significantly to 19th-century literary scholarship.