Few, if any, movements in the history of our literature have been as complex, or as consistently the center of controversy, as has English Romanticism. No two observers see precisely the same thing when they look at it; indeed, no two Romantics saw it in quite the same way. “There are many Romanticisms,” wrote the critic and scholar A. O. Lovejoy. In his Guide through the Romantic Movement, Ernest Bernbaum listed twenty-eight definitions of Romanticism (which he claimed to have “selected from many hundreds” propounded by distinguished critics and authors), all of them defensible, none of them easily reconciled with another. Though, as M. H. Abrams has observed, “[t]he Age of Romanticism . . . ushered in the modern world,” Romanticism has become a stickier topic in the twentieth century than ever before; the classically oriented New Critics—who preferred irony and paradox to the Romantics’ childlike literalness, objectivity to their subjectivity, and greatness of mind to their fullness of heart—roundly condemned Romanticism for its supposed optimism and credulity, its glorification of the self and the “Inner Voice,” and its supposed rejection of reason, self-control, self-criticism, and moral responsibility. Eliot argued that the Metaphysical poets had been blessed with a unity of intellect and feeling that the Romantics failed to achieve; the Humanist critic Irving Babbitt saw Romanticism as an attempt “to discredit the analytical intellect,” and his fellow Humanist Paul Elmer More complained that Romanticism consisted in “the illusion of beholding the infinite within the stream of nature