Wordsworth's Pope

Recent studies of Romanticism have neglected to examine the ways in which Romanticism defined itself by reconfiguring its literary past. Robert J. Griffin identifies the genesis of a Romantic narrative of literary history in which Alexander Pope figured as an alien poet of reason and imitation, and traces the transmission of "romantic literary history" from the Wartons to M. H. Abrams. In so doing, he calls into question some of our most basic assumptions about the chronological and conceptual boundaries of Romanticism.