  Printer-friendly versionSend by email  Reviewed by Mark Canuel
The University of Illinois at Chicago    This is not by any
means to say that this book removes itself from the trends of
historicist criticism; it instead purports to engage those
trends with a revisionary spirit. The introduction thus
carefully positions the argument in relation to work of other
historicist critics; it is here that Cronin states his aim to
avoid the "untheoretical humanism" of Jerome McGann's Romantic
Ideology on the one hand and the "distressingly blunt" and
"terse" analyses of poetry's political alliances in Marilyn
Butler's Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (4, 8). The object
of this book is neither merely to identify poetry's political
alliances nor to criticize them; it is to show poetry's more
constructive relation to politics: how poetry "speaks to a
divided society in an attempt to constitute its readers as
citizens of what [Geoffrey] Hill calls . . . the just kingdom,
and . . . the pure commonwealth" (13).  That th