[Geoffrey Hartman] repeatedly proves himself a subtle analyst of genres, though he usually prefers to invent or discover his own. Several essays in The Fate of Reading illustrate the kind of criticism he now does best: the grouping together, as a subgenre, of a series of thematically linked poems which, when arranged in this way, come to manifest different degrees of consciousness and self-consciousness (consciousness of the group in which they find themselves) and thus tell a tale of the adventures of Poesy or of the trials of the Poetical Character. The best of these, "Evening Star and Evening Land," invokes poems addressed to the evening star and explores the way in which the investigation of poetic consciousness and its development arises as a solution to the problem of how to narrate Nature.

Expert in the perception of self-reflexive figures, Hartman discovers, as the preoccupation of most sub-genres, the task of continuing poetry and the difficulties of emerging as poet through a representation of self in poetic language…. Literary history is the history of fictions and of the anxieties which accompany fiction: fear of a decline in poetical energy, concern with the impossibility of achieving unmediated presence through fictive representation, anxiety about the authenticity of the self that emerges through poetic representation.

There are real problems here, real opportunities for literary history, which Hartman explores with a cunning elegance. But his historical project has a perverse accompaniment which ultimately hints at an ahistorical nostalgia: the revival of late eighteenth-century critical discourse as the privileged metalanguage. Notions of the poetical spirit and the poetical character may well be apposite figures for the problems of poetic reflexivity, but this supposed historical fidelity is finally part of an escape from real literary history. Hartman seems uncertain whether to reconstruct historical series and modes or to play the role of gloomy oracle, announcing cultural decline, the intolerable burden of history and the necessity of error; and his language assists a studied equivocation. It is sad when so talented a critic evades problems he could treat so well, and one may be forgiven for supposing that he feels pursued by a demon. Certainly here, in the glorification of Romanticism's impossible calling, in the surrender to the temptations of the gnomic, one recognizes the debilitating influence of Harold Bloom, a true anxiety of influence. (pp. 90-1)