Romantic ideology has descended to us, says McGann, largely through the lines of

thought that have developed from Coleridge and Hegel (the German ideology). But
while the Romantic ideology of 1789 to 1824 was articulated, to a large extent,
by poets skeptical of many of its features, this ambivalence and self-conscious
ness largely disappears in the debased forms of Romantic ideology we encounter t
oday. McGann censures his own 1968 study, Fiery Dust: Byron s Poetic Development,
because of its absorption in Romanticism s self-representations and its presumptio
n of the poet s linear development (a biographic teleology that cripples much crit
ical thinking about art).
The uncritical acceptance of Romantic ideology, however, poses problems for more
than the study of Romanticism. The effect is all the more disastrous when, inst
itutionally reified, this ideology continues to be the basis for the reception o
f post-Romantic poetry by an influential segment of what McGann calls the cleris
y, that is, literary academia. In this light, the grotesque, yet systematic, mis
judgments about twentieth century poetry by a critic of Romanticism such as Haro
ld Bloom become more understandable, if no less excusable. MGann s sometimes humor
ous self-consciousness, true to his own didactic intentions, specifically keeps
the focus on that narrowest and most cloistered of spheres...the critical work pr
oduced by the literary academy . It would be a mistake to ignore the pervasivenes
s of the same debased Romantic ideology as it informs much contemporary American
poetry. Indeed, a broad range of seemingly antagonistic tendencies in current w
riting share a conception of poetry as giving a voice to unmediated basic truths of i
magination and feeling through direct expression of human creativity ; they also shar
n allergic reaction to any intimation, in a poem, of intellectual or ideological
self-consciousness. Absorption in Romanticism s self- representations, then, is n
ot only a problem for critics; it is also a problem for poetry. This is the kind
of reciprocal interaction in our own time that McGann sees as central to unders
tanding the ideological context and reception of past and present literature.
I take McGann s various explications of Romantic ideology to be provisional, that
is, a stage in the development of an historical criticism informed as much by th
e contemporary ideological climate as by Romantic texts. While McGann rejects René W
ellek s view that there is a basic unity underlying the various manifestations of
Romanticism, he does not quite adopt Lovejoy s skepticism Romanticisms not Romanti
cism. The first step in breaking from the spell of a unified Romanticism is to re
cognize its particular and parochial ideological formations , states McGann. McGan
n notes the fundamentally Christian character of the Romanticism formulated by C
oleridge and formalized by Hegel. It is not surprising, then, that Heine a poet
inclined to consciously resist absorption in Christian Romanticism would write a
work McGann finds paradigmatic for historical criticism, The Romantic School. H
eine writes between 1833 and 1835 as an expatriate German Jew to a French intelle
ctual audience about a cultural phenomenon, German Romanticism, which is now his
torically concluded At every point Heine is concerned with the problem of the im
mediate relevance of removed cultural resources in this case, German Romantic li
terary works. He is qualified to take up this problematic matter because he cont
ains in himself, as it were, a crucial division of sympathies and knowledge