The replacement of the mechanical philosophy by an organic view of the cosmos is one of the most significant features of Romanticism. My article explains why the Romantics felt compelled to attack the mechanical philosophy and confirms Peckham's findings that the new organicism accounts for a large part of Romantic theory. This theory led to substantial progress in our understanding of the humanities. The Romantic world view is, however, no less flawed than the view it temporarily superseded: it is incompatible with the foundations of modern science.

Whitman's experimental poetic, a part of larger personal and national experiments, was severely tried by the assassination of President Lincoln. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” the poem occasioned by Lincoln's death, is not a traditional elegy but a crisis poem: in it, Whitman tests the efficacy of various poetic and linguistic forms and conventions in confronting the terrorism of history and the acute consciousness of time that the assassination triggered in him. While he acknowledges in “Lilacs” the attractions of elegiac conventions, narrative orders, symbolism, and transcendent lyricism, he learns in the course of the poem to do without them and the consolations they offer. “Lilacs” not only reaffirms Whitman's commitment to experimentalism but moves beyond his earlier major poems in its full consciousness and complete acceptance of the dangers and the necessity of forgoing the protection of conventions and traditional forms and orders.

Animal fables pass from country to country and century to century, but not unchanged. Because fables have explicit moralizations, the innovative medieval fabulists (Marie, Odo, and Berechiah through Henryson) help us test what authors meant by meaning and what freedoms they took with tradition. We catch them thinking aloud. As they develop social satire, play with allegory, and dramatize style, they maintain a consistent reasoning process something like what we now call structuralist, but something, too, like Augustinian exegesis. We can partially learn to read like a medieval reader, yet we find even the explicit and documented meanings too various to be caught, caged, and cataloged by our theories. With fables as with their wilder cousins, the Nun's Priest's Tale, the Bestiary of Love, and unmoralized literature, neither we nor the medieval reader can anticipate when the author will double back to surprise us. Surprise, it seems, was itself a tradition.

Paradoxically, the key to Marvell's “Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun” is the controversy the poem has inspired. Each critical interpretation is both true and false: none can stand alone; each must be combined with all the others, no matter how seemingly antithetical, to form an overall pattern that is “traditional” in the broadest sense of the word. The “Complaint” is not solely for a fawn, nor is it a lament only for the passing of an old world order, pastoral simplicity, Christ, love, or innocence; it is an elegy for all things that must die and an accurate portrait of the mind's attempt to deal with the inevitability of pain and loss.

Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork, The Recluse, is often regarded as a nonexistent text. Though Wordsworth never completed the entire plan, its fragments constitute nearly twenty thousand lines of poetry that can be coherently interpreted. In their probable order of composition, the extant parts reveal a dialectical movement between Wordsworth's commitment to a public epic of secular redemption and his fascination with private poetry exploring his own genius. Three distinct episodes in this pattern can be identified in the active period of The Recluse's development (1797-1815). Each begins with Wordsworth's effort to write The Recluse, followed by a recoil into Prelude-type poetry, ending with the completion of some portion of The Recluse. In all three, Wordsworth's determination to give “Human Life” or society its due can be seen as at once the motivation and the stumbling block of his uneven progress toward The Recluse.

Margaret Fuller, despite her personal association with transcendentalism, has increasingly come to be seen apart from that movement, as a rebel whose rejection of Romantic Boston was essential to her development. Yet Fuller is best understood as an embodiment of the value most central to transcendentalism, “self-culture.” The doctrine of the cultivation of the self preached by Channing and others profoundly influenced all the transcendentalists, including Fuller. But her concentration on its implications for feminist concerns led to her important work on women's culture, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. This long essay—which evolved through an intense study of Goethean criticism and a series of discussions, or “Conversations,” that Fuller organized for women—is best seen as the application of transcendental philosophy to the concerns of women and as an instructive example of the connections between idealist philosophy and social reform.