Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen

Charles Rosen

  • Winner of the 1999 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, Awarded by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop

Introduction

Romantic Illusions

The Definitive Text
Honoré de Balzac, George Gordon Byron, William Wordsworth

The Intense Inane: Religious Revival in English, French, and German Romanticism
M.K. Abrams, William Empson

Separating Life and Art: Romantic Documents, Romantic Punctuation
Gustave Flaubert, George Gordon Byron

The Cookbook as Romantic Pastoral
Elizabeth David

Secret Codes
Caspar David Friedrich, Robert Schumann

Mad Poets
William Cowper, Christopher Smart, Friedrich Hölderlin

Approaches to Criticism

The Ruins of Walter Benjamin
German and English Baroque Drama, Romantic Aesthetics, and Symbolist Theory of Language

Concealed Structures
Heinrich Schenker, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson

Ambiguous Intentions
William Empson

The Journalist Critic as Hero
George Bernard Shaw

Acknowledgments

Romantic Generation

  • Cover: Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen
  • A photo of the author

Charles Rosen is a pianist and Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In addition to The Classical Style, which won the National Book Award, his previous books include Sonata Forms and Romanticism and Realism (with Henri Zerner).