You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As every reader of Romantic poetry knows, one of its major features is the climactic moment of recognition or new awareness when the speaker of a lyric or the main character in a narrative or dramatic work makes a revelatory discovery about himself, his past, Nature, or human existence. In such a moment, Wordsworth says in “Tintern Abbey,” “We see into the life of things.”1 The moment is represented as a turning point, a move from ignorance to knowledge or understanding, and a transformation of self. It is no exaggeration to say that such moments constitute both a structural principle of the poetry and a principle of being, of psychological life, for the Romantic self.
Yet surprisingly little attention has been given to the psychology of these moments. In Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams calls attention to their central role in Romantic experience, treating them as secular versions of the Augustinian moment of revelation, but refers only to the sublime moment and offers no account of its psychogenesis or dynamics (). The most searching study to date is Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime, but his psychoanalytically informed discussion also concentrates on the sublime moment (Weiskel , 22-33, 38-44; Hertz , 40-60). Two recent works that add to our general understanding are Ashton Nichols' The Poetics of Epiphany and Terence Cave's Recognitions (; ). The power and depth of Cave's critical commentary, along with its historical and cultural range (from the Greeks to the moderns), make his book a landmark study. Cave, however, does not discuss the Romantic poets. Nichols, on the other hand, valuably traces the modern epiphany to them, especially to Wordsworth, but does not deal with the crucial psychological questions posed by these moments of new awareness or recognition in Romantic poetry.