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 ofthe 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 andother 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