Abrams concedes that his summary of the progression of art criticism over the 2,000 years of aesthetic philosophy is a simplification. Therefore, he now focuses his discussion on the specific moments in history when aesthetics touched on, or advanced, a theory of art that considered the artist and emotion as the focal point of art, rather than the audience or universe. He explains that rhetorical theory specifically included expressions of emotion as important for efficacy (since rhetoricians regarded expressing emotion or playing upon an audience’s emotions as a key part of persuasion), citing Cicero, Horace, and Johnson as key examples of that theory.

The ancient Greek writer Longinus’s concept of the Sublime permeates both the art and the philosophy of the Romantic period. Longinus’s pivotal work, On the Sublime, established a definition and discussion of a new criteria for excellence in art that was a marked departure from Aristotelian and Platonic models. Longinus looked at several elements of poetic creation, arguing that the highest form of art uses “‘great conceptions’… ‘vehement and inspired passion’…figurative language, noble diction, and elevated composition” (73) as the five elements of excellence. The latter three can be practiced and honed, but the first two require an element of natural genius in the artist. The element of passion, or an expression of the artist’s true emotion, was particularly important in the shift from Mimetic and Pragmatic theories to the dominant Expressive theory in the 19th century.

Various 18th-century scholars, notably John Dennis and Bishop Lowth, discussed Longinus’s focus on the passion of the artist as a primary criterion of excellence. In so doing, they created a dichotomy between the language of prose and the language of poetry: The former was characterized by coolness and reason, while the latter was excited and heated. Lowth’s work, in particular, argued that figurative language is by definition a reflection of true passion, and therefore that a talent with figurative language is, like passion and great conception, an innate or natural talent of a poet. Abrams shows a direct line from Dennis and Lowth to Romantic thinkers like Wordsworth and John Keble (1792-1866). Though the earlier scholars were still primarily focused on Mimetic and/or Pragmatic approaches to poetic scholarship, there was a clear movement towards the value of the artist’s emotion in the legacy of Longinus.

To further trace the history of poetic scholarship, Abrams examines theories on the origin of language and poetry. Mimetic and Pragmatic thought generally connected to the Aristotelian assumption that poetry emerges from the human instinct to imitate, just as language develops from that primitive imitation of sounds. However, Lucretius and the Epicureans believed language and poetry developed separately, and that language was the vocal expression of human emotion. Lucretius’s ideas inspired a later position that the origin of poetry likewise was a natural expression of emotion.

Abrams traces this school of thought on primitive poetry and language through the 18th century to demonstrate the development of the foundations of poetic theory in the German and English Romantic movements, which insisted that poetry is inherently natural and a spontaneous expression of genuine human emotion. This definition of poetry as the outward expression of the poet’s internal self also coincided with a genre shift from tragic and epic poetry to primarily lyric poetry.

Though lyric poetry existed from the English Renaissance through the 18th century, lyric was largely dismissed as contrived or trifling by critics until the late 18th century. This shift came largely from biblical scholars who pointed out that various elements of the Hebrew Bible are lyric, such as the psalms. From a “great lyric” designation came a potential for Lyric Poetry to be treated equally to epic and tragic poems. Abrams cites Sir William Jones’s work in the mid-18th century as marking a stark distinction between Mimetic and Expressive literary theory.

As critics in England developed these new conceptions of lyric poetry, German aesthetic philosophers in the 18th century were also moving away from Pragmatic and Mimetic Theories of art, primarily via music. While English scholars argued that poetry is the original human art, German thinkers argued that music, because of its abstract nature, more accurately evokes and performs real human emotion. In both schools of thought, the expression of passion and emotion became paramount in determining the value of art.

Abrams then ties these trends in the early 19th century to Wordsworth, applying Expressive theory directly to the Romantic poets and their emphasis on the interior life of the poet. Having traced the history of literary theory and aesthetic philosophy from the Mimetic through the Pragmatic and into the Expressive, Abrams now turns to focus on the poets themselves.