1981/01/01 by Jerome J. McGann, Jerome McGann
Social Sciences · #Historical and Literary Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/2872913
These Romantic judgments upon Crabbe eventually became normative, not merely for those who agreed with their assessment of Crabbe's value, but even for those who-like Leavis himself-saw Crabbe as living classic. It is a commonplace of criticism to say of Crabbe that he was <the last of the Augustans. Leavis himself reproduced such a view when he said that Crabbe's sensibility belongs to an order that those who were most alive to the age ... had ceased to find sympathetic. In short, Crabbe was an anachronism, and was recognized as such by the most advanced of his contemporaries.2 We may obtain a sharper understanding of these critical judgments, however, if we place them in a more generous historical context. We must see, first of all, that the Romantic judgment was part of a more general ideological struggle in which various parties engaged. Coleridge's and Wordsworth's views corresponded to those set forth in, for example, the Quarterly Review, but they were vigorously contested by many others-most notably in the series of articles on Crabbe written for the Edinburgh Review by Jeffrey. Indeed, Jeffrey's hostility to Wordsworth and the Lake School, and his approbation of Crabbe, constitute one of the most important local manifestations of the various cultural struggles which marked the entire period. We may glimpse the complexity of these strug-