2010 The Mirror and the Lamp: ROMANTIC THEORY AND THE CRITICAL TRADITION By M. H. ABRAMS: Is must go farther sill: that sonl must Become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one ‘activity, the mirror turn lamp. wrotsane buTtaR years OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS London . Oxford : New York‘OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford London Glasgow New York Toronto Melbourne Wellington Nairobi Dares Salam Cape Town Kuala Lumpur Singapore Jakarta_-Hong Kong Tolyo Delhi Bombay Caleutea Madras Karachi To Ruth ISBN. 9TB.O-19-s014716 Copyright 1953 by Oxford University Press, Ine Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 53-7616 First published by Oxford University Press, 1953 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1971 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAPreface ‘Tus noymorseexr oF trans rusony in the lifetime of Coleridge was to a suprising extent the making of the modem ctiical mind. There were many important differences between, let us say, Horace’s Art of Poctry and the clam of Dr. Johnson, but there was also a discernible continuity in premises, aims, and methods. This continuity was broken by the theories of romantic writers, English and Germans ané thei innovations include many of the points of view and procedures which make the characteristic dif. ences beeween traditional criticism and the criticism of our own time, in- cluding some criticism which profeses to be anti-romantic, ‘The primary concern of this book is with the English theory of poetry, and to a lesser extent of the other major ats, daring the first four decades of the nineseenth century. It streses the common orientation which justifies us in identifying a specifically ‘romantic’ criticism; but not, T trust, at the cost of overlocking the many important diversities among the writers who concerned themselves with the nature of postry or art, its psychological genes, its constitution and kinds, ts major criteria, and its relation to other Jmporant human concerns. The book deals, for the most part, with the inal and enduring critics of the time, rather than with the runathe- rill reviewers who often had a more immediate though shorterlived in- uence on the general reading public. In order to emphasize the pivoeal position of the age in the general history of eriticiom, I have treated English romantic theory in a broad intellectual context, and I have tried to keep constantly in view the background of cighteenth-century aesthetics from which romantic aesthetics wat in part a development, and agsinst which it was, still more, « deliberate reaction. I have described some of the relations of English critical theory to foreign thought, especially to the richly suggestive German speculations of the age, beginning with Herder and Kant, when Germany replaced England and France a the chief exporter of ideas to the Western world, T have also moved freely in time, going back to the Greek and Roman origins of aes-