SOURCE: Parrinder, Patrick. “The Romantic Critics.” In Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750-1990, pp. 64-116. London: Macmillan, 1991.

In the following excerpt, originally published in a different form in 1977, Parrinder compares areas of agreement and points of contention between the writings of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Keats, and the critical doctrines of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Shelley, Hazlitt and Keats

In his famous dictum about ‘negative capability’, Keats chooses Coleridge as his example of the non-poet irritably reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge had managed to convince himself that the poetic spirit, while deeply hostile to British empirical philosophy, could be subsumed under the higher reason of Kantian transcendentalism. Others did not agree. None the less, the theme of opposition to utilitarian doctrine is very widespread in the period, from Coleridge's Church and State to de Quincey, Hazlitt, and Shelley's ‘Defence of Poetry’. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and...