The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

Abrams opens this chapter with Wordsworth’s quote describing poetry as “an overflow of powerful feelings” (47), which Abrams regards as the foundational argument for Romantic criticism’s privileging of the artist over all other co-ordinates. Abrams then compares definitions of poetry from important critics and poets from the Romantic period. In essence, the Romantics agree that poetry is an external expression of the artist’s internal mind which encompasses intellect, imagination, passion, and fancy.

Romantic-period writers both in England and Germany also moved from comparing poetry with painting to music. Music was the first art form to be philosophically separated from Mimetic Theory, signifying a move away from defining art as a reflection of the Universe. Painting’s pictorial nature was more easily tied to the metaphor of being a mirror of the world, while music’s auditory nature was a metaphor for the reflection of emotion or passion. Thus, placing poetry in concert with music placed more emphasis on poetry’s expression of inner truths rather than external facts.

This connection between music and poetry led to the leading Romantic critic William Hazlitt’s (1778-1830) metaphor of poetry as a mirror of the internal poet rather than the external world, but Hazlitt added the metaphor of the