Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > English Romantic Hellenism - Overviews

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Harry Levin (essay date 1931)

SOURCE: The Broken Column: A Study in Romantic Hellenism, Harvard University Press, 1931, pp. 29-76.

[In the excerpt that follows, Levin analyzes the characteristics of Romantic Hellenism and discusses the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats as representative of various types of Romantic Hellenism.]

An Anatomy of Romantic Hellenism

Before we proceed on our quest for the amaranth flower, it may be well for us to fix firmly in mind the characteristics of romantic Hellenism. I shall therefore attempt, very briefly, to anatomize the subject in its successive stages. It begins, as I have indicated, in a complete distrust of the classics, which are associated with the neo-classical period of western European literature. Gradually Greece is dissociated from the rest and converted into an Arcadia for the romanticists. World-weary denizens of the drawing-rooms are ready to divide the world,...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Poetry
3. Overviews
4. Historical Development Of English Romantic Hellenism
5. Influence Of Greek Mythology On The Romantics
6. Influence Of Greek Literature, Art, And Culture On The Romantics
7. Further Reading
8. Copyright