Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

Poetics, 714 ). During the Romantic period the lyric was a central poetic

genre; one scholar notes that the Romantics equated the lyric with po-

etry in general (Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 235 ).

The Russian scholar Lidiia Ginzburg attributes the development of

the nineteenth-century Russian lyric to the breakdown of the neoclas-

sical poetic “genre system.” In the eighteenth and the early nineteenth

century, she writes, poets did not create the subject of their poems but

rather chose a poetic genre: ode, elegy, epistle, satire (O lirike, 53 ). The

subject and mood of a poem were implicit in its genre.^53 By Lermontov’s

time, however, the poet himself had become the lyric subject. The dis-

tinguishing feature of the lyric, Ginzburg maintains, is that the poet, be-

sides being author and subject, also is “included in the aesthetic struc-

ture of the work as its active element” (“v kachestve deistvennogo ee

elementa”) (O lirike, 7 ). In Fet’s poetry, for example, the poet does not ap-

pear as the lyric subject, yet is nonetheless present. The early nineteenth

century also saw the lyric of thought—the ode—merge with the lyric of

feeling—the elegy.^54 After 1820 , Ginzburg continues, a demand for a

“poetry of thought” arose among the Decembrist poets, the “Liubo-

mudry” (Lovers of wisdom, a group of Moscow writers who studied

and discussed Schelling’s philosophy), as well as Belinsky and his circle.

At this time the central issues of the Romantic lyric became the image

of the poet, poetic inspiration, genius, and “the crowd” (91–92).

M. H. Abrams, writing during the 1970 s, as did Ginzburg, also de-

scribed thought as central to English and German Romantic poetry. For

Abrams the defining characteristic of Romantic poetry is its close rela-

tion to the philosophy of the time: the concern of both Romantic poets

and Romantic philosophers (Schelling, Fichte, Hegel) with polarities,

antitheses, unity lost and regained, “the fall from primal unity to self-

division, self-contradiction, and self-conflict,” and a circular or spiral

quest that ended in a “loving union with the feminine other.”^55

More recent scholarship, however, has begun to question these and

other assumptions about Romanticism and the Romantic lyric. One

scholar points out that Romanticismas a general term for European po-

etry of the first part of the nineteenth century was first introduced only

in the 1860 s; the poets we now call Romantics did not refer to themselves

in this way. He further suggests that the meaning of Romanticism

changes with each generation’s shifting “Romantic” canons.^56 As noted

in the introduction, during the “Romantic” period men and women po-

ets occupied themselves with different issues. Recent scholars have

shown that while men poets wrote about subjective idealism (the arche-

82 Gender and Genre