 | Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge Subjects: Wordsworth William 1770–1850 -- Criticism and interpretation; Coleridge Samuel Taylor 1772–1834 -- Criticism and interpretation; Romanticism is often regarded as a turning point in literary history, the time when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Yet despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romantics manifest a highly intertextual style that, while repressing certain classical and neoclassical literary conventions, reveals a deep dependence on those same rhetorical practices. Repression results in the symptoms of originality but it inevitably leads to the return of tradition in a different form. |
