LAUSR

Thus the tendency to sunder the philosophical idealism of the Romantics from their historical specificity, so prevalent in Romantic criticism today, is persuasively reversed in Michael’s study. As he presents it, a specific political context might stimulate, without reducing or constricting, theoria as well as praxis and indeed poesis. Among the most valuable aspects of this study are new analyses of canonical Romantic poetry, including Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, where Michael’s arguments about the Romantic critique of political reason are taken through to poetic practice. The book is a welcome return to key canonical writers of the Romantic era whose works—and sometimes, the critical commonplaces about that work—are here revitalized. The intellectual energy of Wollstonecraft’s response to Burke, Godwin’s rationalism, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s political prose, and Shelley’s “sceptical idealism” is newly restored by Michael. Not the least of the strengths of this work is the lucidity of its author’s style: the clarity with which he presents and prosecutes his thesis, summarizes or elaborates particular intellectual positions and debates as he sets out their bearings on his discussion, adds considerably to the force of his insights. Some of Michael’s omissions, of course, might be open to question.William Hazlitt, the epistemological foundations of whose political thought have been securely established in the last few decades, and who has been shown to be the writer of some of the best of the Romantic era’s political prose, is referred to only once, in the author’s introductory disclaimers (30)—perhaps because he could hardly have been mentioned at all in the body of the discussion without being taken up for the purpose. Such omissions, however, do little to detract from the book’s importance. Beyond the specificities of his particular topic, Michael’s most valuable contribution remains: in his showing, although less explicitly than Pfau and on rather different grounds, how the study of Romanticism bears directly on the problems and pressures of the present day.