Allegory in British Romanticism

Abstract

British Romantic period writers and critics inherited from the eighteenth century a suspicion of allegory, which they conceived as a discursive, and more particularly narrative, genre. Thus they freely used personified abstractions in lyric poetry without considering them allegorical. Typically apostrophized, such personifications tended to be isolated from narrative action. Notwithstanding the attention it received in twentieth-century criticism and semiotics, Coleridge’s distinction between allegory and the symbol was a marginal issue in its time, Coleridge using it to primarily promote his concept of the symbol as an unmotivated, nondiscursive mode of representation in the Bible and nature. Despite enjoying low critical esteem, allegory was used by Romantic writers and artists, especially in political contexts, while older allegorical writers like Dante, Spenser, and Bunyan were admired. Like Coleridge’s ‘supernatural poems’, the mythological poems of Tighe, Keats, and P. B. Shelley were ‘quasi-allegorical’, simultaneously inviting and resisting allegorical interpretation.