Volume 48, Number 9 · May 31, 2001
Bad Guy Number One
By Christopher Hitchens
Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confessions of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright
Andrew Motion
Knopf, 276 pp., $26.00 (To be published in paperback by University of Chicago Press in November 2001.)
Of all our customary critical expressions, the word 'Romantic' has probably suffered the most from diminishing returns. Its protean character can be seen in the contradictions of ordinary speech, where a romantic 'interlude,' for example, is rather a good thing whereas a romantic 'scheme' is rather not. The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, by F.L. Lucas, numbers 11,396 definitions of 'romanticism.' Reduced to English terms, the Romantic movement occurs somewhere between 1798, when Wordsworth and Coleridge brought out the first Lyrical Ballads, and the death of Sir Walter Scott (and Goethe) in 1832. Though it is not precisely coterminous with the days of the Prince Regent, this period can also be identified with 'the Regency.' Its elements include a preference for nature over classical form, a looser rein for the emotions and the expression of personality, and in politics a certain democratic (and often secular) radicalism. Its ironic nemesis is disillusionment, of the varying sorts experienced by Hazlitt and Wordsworth, sometimes accompanied by narcotic addiction and often by early death.
Review, 2753 words
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