When M. H. Abrams published a defense, in 1972, of "theorizing about the arts" ["What's the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?"], some of his critics accused him of falling into subjectivism. He had made his case so forcefully against "the confrontation model of aesthetic criticism" and had so effectively argued against "simplified" and "invariable" models of the art work and of "the function of criticism" that some readers thought he had thrown overboard the very possibility of a rational criticism tested by objective criteria.

In his reply to these critics ["A Note on Wittgenstein and Literary Criticism," published in the journal English Literary History], Abrams concentrates almost entirely on whether his critical pluralism is finally a skeptical relativism. He does not even mention his great historical works, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism, and he has nothing to say about how his pluralistic theories could be applied to the writing of history. But then, surprising as it seems once we think about it, neither of the two histories says much about his method either. (p. 139)

In both of these recent articles, Abrams proposes critical pluralism as a base for humanistic inquiry. He sees belief in a plurality of valid critical modes not simply as one interesting possibility but as a position forced upon us by what we now know, both about the history of critical rivalry and about the way our minds work. It is true that the search for the one thing needful, in criticism as in everything else, has often yielded important results, and it will no doubt do so again; but it can be pursued, Abrams would say, only in a state of innocence…. (pp. 139-40)

On many occasions in a lifetime devoted to the humanities, M. H. Abrams has said to the world, "This is so, isn't it?" And the world—or at least the world of Romanticists—has responded with an unusually emphatic "Yes." Those who have said "Yes, but …" have generally muted their reservations and underlined their agreement…. (p. 143)

But what have readers been saying yes to? Surely not to any simple list of propositions about Romanticism, as Abrams' critics have seemed to suggest. And surely not to any coded list of two or three kinds of statement, like the "color" and "feeling" pair that Abrams borrows from Wittgenstein. What we assent to, rather, in reading each of his books, is a history, a story; and that means that we come to accept an immeasurably more complex and challenging body of knowledge than Abrams' own talk about method has suggested.

One can hardly blame him for the oversight, for the cognitive claims of "story" are extraordinarily difficult to talk about. But to do even partial justice to Abrams, we must make the attempt, knowing in advance that since we cannot here duplicate the effects of story we are doomed to offer only the palest reflection of the real thing. My case, finally, will be that we have all understated the peculiar kind of demonstration that telling a story about our cultural past can provide. Though the case could be made almost equally well with either of Abrams' books, I shall talk entirely of Natural Supernaturalism, since it is the more ambitious and more difficult work.

What does Natural Supernaturalism "argue for"? If we take seriously the reduction of flowing history to static propositions, we find at least ten kinds of such propositions advanced here.

1. There are claims to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of literal, specific causal connections between Wordsworth's poems and what came before and after. Most readers have noticed echoes of Milton; Abrams traces them in overwhelming detail. Most readers have noted biblical quotations and allusions; Abrams shows us so many more that the sheer quantity serves his argument about larger theses.

Many of his "short stories," as these causal lines might be called, are so precise and so nearly indisputable that we might consider them as answers not to "color" questions but to "wavelength" questions, as firm in the response to positive tests as any data accepted by physical scientists. But of course many are less firm, and some are highly conjectural. Clearly the reader's willingness to accept conjecture will depend in part on whether Abrams himself seems to know the difference between what is rock-firm and what is a bit soggy.

2. Surrounding these, and in effect built out of them, there are a fair number of large-scale causal theses, derived from what we might call "embedded novellas." When reviewers have attempted to summarize the book, their proportions have been limited almost entirely to this kind—to factual assertions about literal causes that seem easy to test in propositional form. Treated as answering Wittgenstein's first kind of question, "What color is it?", they can then easily be "refuted" by any critic working with different details: as if to say, "Romanticism wasn't really Abrams' color, scarlet, it was really my color, crimson." (pp. 143-44)

It would be interesting to trace how each reviewer has centered on this or that causal chain, entirely ignoring the others. With a little ingenuity, one could compile a list longer than all of the printed responses put together, since the book in a sense provides a conspectus on the whole of Western civilization.

It seems evident that propositions in the form "This is how it happened that X (usually an abstraction) led to Y (usually another abstraction)" are not in any simple sense reducible to one kind of "factual" claim. It is true that when X and Y are not abstractions, they may seem testable with at least as much clarity as can be found in treating questions about color. But they are often "things," like German and English "Romanticism," and there is thus considerable variety in the kinds of causation and narrative sequence implied.

3. Abrams is perhaps even more interested in the kind of parallels, or congruence, or consonance discoverable between Wordsworth, his ancestors, his contemporaries, and his descendants. Insofar as there are causal claims in these comparisons, they are elusive, ambiguous—and of course troublesome to critics. (p. 145)

4. When Wordsworth wrote his Preface to The Excursion, and when he conceived The Recluse, that grand epic of which The Excursion and The Prelude were parts, and when he wrote the Prospectus as part of the Preface, he was not only claiming to speak for the spirit of his age, he was in fact speaking for that spirit.

5. There thus was such a thing, a spirit of Romanticism, a "distinctive Romantic ethos," which the major Romantic writers "put forward in the assurance of their innovative prime."… Nominalist historians who question the notion of epochs (as I was taught to do by R. S. Crane, who called Abrams a "Platonist historian" for believing in such things) are thus challenged directly and quite literally: "I will show you, I have shown you, this and this and this respect in which these authors all thought alike, and the differences among them that we all can see are less significant than these similarities." In short: he advances an "existence" proposition of a peculiar kind that many philosophers and some historians say is illegitimate. What is worse, it includes a value claim about the existing "spirit."

6. Wordsworth was more fully representative of that spirit than any other Romantic poet.

a) He took the Romantic "marks" more seriously and incorporated them more completely than did the other poets. Abrams' own headings give a pretty fair notion of what those marks are: The Apocalyptic Marriage; Crisis-Autobiography; The Transactions of Mind and Nature; The Theodicy of the Private Life and of the Landscape; The Redemptive Imagination; The Circuitous Journey; The Prodigal's Return; Apocalypse by Revolution, by Imagination, and by Cognition; The Poet's Vision: The New Earth and the Old—and so on. Each heading might be prefaced like this: "Here is the story of how Wordsworth represents the Romantic way of dealing with…."

b) He saw his life-work as unified under these marks: all of his work was to be "one poem," organically unified as the effort of the seer-poet to explore the mind, to discover the points at which it was fitted to nature and nature fitted to the mind, and then to report back to mankind the "cheering" and "redeeming" dawn of a new age and new life and new truth.

c) His poetry was peculiarly powerful.

Here, with the most explicit value judgment in my list so far, we are even more obviously heading into trouble. In spite of all that has recently been done to question dogmas about the impossibility of giving rational argument for evaluative propositions, many still would take it as self-evident that Abrams could only assert the value of Wordsworth, of his poetry, and of the other hierarchical judgments that follow. That he does indeed establish this judgment will be central to my argument in the next section.

7. Romanticism as it was realized in Wordsworth marked a great turning point in Western cultural history. It collected into itself a variety of religious themes, motives, and forms from earlier ages, both classical and biblical, and remolded them into a kind of secular religion, a religion of which the great Romantic poets saw themselves to be prophets. In short: Abrams advances propositions about the comparative importance of epochs.

8. They certainly were prophets, if by that we mean those who are endowed with the power to foresee, or at least proclaim or help establish, profound themes, motives, and forms that will dominate the years to come. Wordsworth and company endowed us with many of our most characteristic and important modern concerns…. In short: Abrams dares to assert the comparative value of prophets.

9. At the same time, they differed radically from us, particularly in the "Romantic positives" which many modern authors have rejected.

a) They did not see their priesthood as in the service of an autonomous art but as in the service, as Wordsworth says, "of [men's] redemption."… "The Romantic aesthetic was of art for man's sake, and for life's sake."… (pp. 146-47)

b) "The Romantic writers neither sought to demolish their life in this world in a desperate search for something new nor lashed out in despair against the inherited culture…. They spoke as members of what Wordsworth called the 'One great Society … / The noble Living and the noble Dead,'" not as members of an adversary culture….

c) They thought of themselves as serving the supreme values of "life, love, liberty, hope, and joy."… When they wrote of dejection and despair, as they often did, they always dealt with those negatives and transformed them into "Romantic positives." Indeed, Wordsworth's life-work can be viewed as a grand effort to turn the potential negations and doubts of his time into a saving poetry that will "chear / Mankind in times to come." For Wordsworth, "unity with himself and his world is the primal and normative state of man, of which the sign is a fullness of shared life and the condition of joy."… (p. 147)

d) Their positive, affirmative, "redemptive" stance in the face of life's horrors and in response to disappointed revolutionary hopes was at least as reasonable, at least as honest, at least as viable a basis for art, and at least as radically critical, as the various stances of our own time, many of which are more obviously "negative" and despairing.

I put this last thesis cautiously, because Abrams is perhaps even more cautious about it. His conclusion shows both the caution and the conviction: "If such affirmations strike a contemporary ear as deluded or outworn, that may be the index of their relevance to an age of profounder dereliction and dismay than Shelley and Wordsworth knew."… I suspect that Abrams understates his true convictions with that word "relevance." How relevant, and in what way? The book as a whole never states, in so many words, that Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley knew all that any of us know about "the horror" or that they were to be admired for going beyond the horror to affirm what still could be affirmed. And it would certainly have been folly to attempt to show that they were more to be admired because they affirmed than are those of our own novelists and poets who, with equal vigor, pursue the nihilistic vision. But Abrams unquestionably defends the reasonableness of their attitudes. In short—and perhaps most shocking of all: Abrams offers propositions that evaluate basic stances toward the whole of life.

10. We could easily extend these grand questions to a long list titled "What Does It All Mean?" About all of them, Abrams leads us to a degree of warranted conclusion, though he states none of them formally—questions like "What is it important to know about my past?" "What does it mean, that I should end up here, in this harried century, following that great but puzzling one—here at the frazzled end of this millennium, following that millennium-and-a-half of baffling but monumental stuff?" "Where in fact are we, in this universe, and what kind of a place is it?" "Who in fact are we, coming from what kind of ancestors?" "What in fact is significant about where we came from and where we are now?" Such overlapping questions, sociological, anthropological, metaphysical, and religious, could never be sorted out into a simple list. What is perhaps most striking is the extreme difficulty they present to anyone who tries to reason about them. They are indeed so difficult, particularly because of their inextricable fusion of fact and value and extreme abstraction, that most modern theorists would simply dismiss them as entirely out of the range of cognitive inquiry. "What, in fact, is significant about where we came from and where we are now?" Why, surely, that all depends, does it not, on your point of view? A cognitive term like "fact" simply does not apply.

Abrams will not allow us that protection. If we enter his narrative world at all, we must see him as trying to answer questions of this most difficult kind. And though it would be absurd to claim that he has provided decisive proofs, I am claiming what for some readers will seem almost as absurd: that when anyone asks any of these questions, one meaningful answer would be to offer him a copy of Natural Supernaturalism. In some sense not accommodated in our organons, Abrams answers some of the questions we care about most.

Persuasion about any of the kinds of truth promised here depends on persuasion about the most obvious but perhaps the most difficult of them all: Abrams purports to convince us that all of this happened; this story is true. One cannot summarize the "this" with any proposition. The closest one might come would be a detailed plot summary, but it would have to be articulated into as many strands as the narrative strands Abrams shows leading into and out of Wordsworth and Romanticism. This is what happened. This really occurred. This is our past. It is here, of course, that the problem of Abrams' pluralism becomes most acute. He often says, and more often implies, that there are "many profitable ways to approach" intellectual history, whether the history of criticism or the more complex history of philosophical and literary themes and forms attempted in Natural Supernaturalism. He is clear enough about the need for other histories of other subjects, but he does not give us much help in deciding in what sense his history is the history of his subject. Is this what occurred? What alternative histories of Wordsworth's central poems, of their themes and structures and of Wordsworth's motives and beliefs, could Abrams allow? How does he feel about those critics (we shall later look at some of them) who think that the true history of Romanticism would have an entirely different plot and very different heroes?

In short, how do I decide—as I do—that Abrams' story in either of his books is superior to René Wellek's or Howard Mumford Jones's or any of the several that have been sketched by critics objecting to Abrams' version? How do I conclude that his evaluation of Wordsworth's poetry is sounder than that, say, of Cleanth Brooks, with his arguments that seem more solidly based on "objective," "intrinsic" analysis? Though I may finally want to say "Yes, but …" to the whole thesis, and though I may want to question some points along the way, what right do I have to feel so thoroughly persuaded?

I must underline once again the sense in which my task of demonstrating his demonstrations is an impossible one. Discursive accounts of a great history are in the nature of the case at least as inadequate, as remote from the living creature, as critical accounts of novels or poems. The problem we face is thus not simply like those that Abrams talks about in his recent articles. The real problem is that our endeavor is in some sense alien to its subject. The proof of Abrams' pudding is in the eating…. [It] is in the experience of Abrams in detail—including the detail of at least a major part of his extensive quotation from other authors—that the validation of his proffered truths is found. And it is this experience that many sincere and competent readers will for various reasons not discover.

In short, all I can hope for, unable to duplicate even a part of the story as story, is to summarize Abrams' "reasons" in a way that will invite some readers to return to the real thing, perhaps taking with them a broadened notion of the proper tests for validity in cultural history.

First, style. Abrams' style is quiet; indeed, sometimes it is bland. One seldom even notices it, and it can thus be grossly deceptive, seeming merely to carry its information. There is simply no visible striving for effect in anything Abrams ever wrote; every sentence seems to assume a reader who already cares about the matters discussed.

One might at first think that such a style is indifferent to readers. On the contrary, it is a style that considers us in what is the most respectful way possible: working on this kind of task, it makes everything as clear and as interesting as the subject matter allows, with no disguising of commonplaces and no pretentious jargon. (pp. 147-50)

The purity of style may seem unimportant; it might even be the product of an accidental matching of Abrams' crotchets with my own. What I find pure, you find dull, and M. Barthes finds infuriatingly cautious. Perhaps. But the fact is that every reviewer I have read has admired the book; and though none of them has said more than a word about style, the style has almost certainly been significant in gaining their admiration, for it creates an air of both mastery and self-effacement. It thus builds trust in this speaker, because he has visibly labored to get rid of his own limitations in order to penetrate the opacities of the past. (p. 151)

I must emphasize here that I am not simply praising Abrams' style. I am making what I take to be a much more risky claim: a style that is good in the way Abrams' style is good not only tends to carry us with him—it ought to. It carries a legitimate warrant for the author's theses. To write well in this way helps prove your case, though of course it cannot go it alone.

We are all deeply trained against this view. Even those who claim that the distinction between style and substance is a false one have learned to ignore what earlier rhetoricians took for granted: style-as-proof. The fact is that if "a subject"—whatever that means—enables a critic to write well about it without requiring him to rely on easily separable blandishments and charm, the mere production of hundreds of pages of well-written sense about it constitutes as good a test as we have for his theses. If the theses were very weak, we have a right to conclude, a man like Abrams (as implied in his style) would have discovered the weakness as he tried to write honest sentences about them; and if he became dishonest and tried to fake, it would somehow show.

This kind of proof is obviously circular. I infer the honest scholarly integrity of the man from the steady honesty of the style—and vice versa! But it is a kind of circularity that careful analysis will reveal in all humanistic studies. In the time of Kenneth Burke, of Michael Polanyi, of phenomenalism and structuralism, no one should any longer be troubled by committing a circularity. Our problem is, as it has always been, to learn to discriminate among circularities. And there is a great difference, as Burke and Crane have already taught us, between circuitous journeys like Abrams', leading back to beginnings that are now radically altered because the journey has occurred, and the kind that are genuinely vicious.

Note finally that such proof works even when the plain sturdiness goes too far and stumbles into banality. I can judge a passage "flat," I can even skip a page or section (as I did on first reading and as Abrams himself, on page 15, suggests that we do) and still find it adding some weight to the proof: Abrams goes on even when I nod, and I tend to blame myself and not him.

After praise that may seem equivocal, I must hasten to add that the plain style is not all that plain. Even if it were, it would do its main job; but Abrams increases our confidence, and thus our final conviction, by employing—still quietly—a rich variety of metaphor. I pause for only one example of what can be found on every page: "The time taken to compose The Prelude straddled the writing of the Prospectus …"…. That looks easy enough, perhaps—until one tries to improve it.

Such stylistic control would in itself inspire no more, perhaps, than a mood of resigned trust. For many readers the same might be said for a second warranting quality that I take to be even more important, especially in a work that establishes historical connections and their consequent values. A colleague of mine once observed of The Mirror and the Lamp that it was the "best-organized work about criticism" that he had ever read. "You show me a quotation from any critic from 1700 to 1850, whether Abrams actually quotes him or not, and I'll show you the precise place in that book where the quotation must belong." Though the historical range of Natural Supernaturalism is much broader, I would say that its ordination of parts is even more impressive because much more complex. A mastery of the large pattern, of what rhetoricians used to call "arrangement," an attention to strategies of presentation that can make the reader an equal master—these are finally inseparable from "the case" that is made. Though it would be strange to call them qualities of style, they reveal themselves in a distinguishable quality of Abrams' style that provides a crucial test for his historical claims, a cognitive test of a kind that has never, so far as I know, been properly recognized.

I am thinking of the art of making persuasive local connections, and particularly transitions from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. Historical claims are, after all, precisely claims about special kinds of relatedness. A convincing history must be, among other things, one in which (1) everything mentioned somehow gets connected with everything else; (2) everything that ought to be mentioned gets mentioned; and (3) every claimed connection is rendered at least plausible to the critical reader.

The first criterion is met with an astonishing consistency. I can find no details that are inert because isolated. (pp. 152-54)

When it comes to the second test, most critics have been far less favorable to Abrams. Most of their objections have in fact rested precisely on the point that Abrams tells a plausible history but only part of the history. He has left out what he should have included; there should have been more about politics, more about Catholicism, more about Eastern religions and literature, more about Nietzsche or Freud or Novalis, more about neglected Romantics—Sir Walter Scott, for example, or, especially, Lord Byron….

But the crucial test is, after all, the third: whether the claimed connections are persuasive. For it is by this that we determine the difference between a major synthesis and the many improvisations that achieve temporary acclaim by the assertion of novel views. (p. 154)

What one finds is a range even richer than is suggested by my ten kinds of proposition. Persuasion results, quite properly, as precise matchings accumulate: strong connections for a strong case, cautious ones for a weak one, vague for vague, metaphorical for metaphorical. (p. 155)

Unlike many historians of ideas, Abrams employs a fourth kind, one that some reviewers have claimed is absent because he is not fond of words like "universal" and "archetype": the elusive "causation" that is shown when an analogy between two works is seen as resulting from some permanent human interest or eternal idea. I think Abrams is perhaps more committed to this kind of Platonic notion than his avoidance of the "eternity" words would suggest. I agree with the reviewers who wish he had grappled more openly with the precise sense in which he means us to take the "parallels" and "echoes" that cannot have been literally caused in temporal history. Does he mean to suggest the technical Platonic sense of "participate" when he says that "Wordsworth's Prelude participates, however guardedly, in a major intellectual tendency of his age, and of ours" …? Or does "tendency" keep us in a time-bound world of efficient causes? Yet, much as I would like to discover more about his acknowledged allegiances, I am not at all sure that the book would be improved by overt discussion of such matters, since it clearly profits so much from the freedom of range that his lack of system provides. (pp. 155-56)

Still, the final test is in the quality of the details, and that is best seen by looking closely at what is connected to what in any one of the many "local" histories that go to make up the whole. Before I do so, two notes: The elements Abrams traces are generally not completed literary works, as they would be in Ronald Crane's postulated causal history of literature. Nor are they quite the unit ideas that Lovejoy and most of his followers have pursued, though some of them might well pass for such. And they are certainly not the independent critical systems, reconstructed in their full integrity and traced in the "fullest possible diversity," without imposing a "unified narrative form," that Robert Marsh has cogently proposed as the essential subject of a history of criticism that would best serve the critic. Most of them are a curious fusion of at least four things: a feeling about life (for example, joy in the face of pain); a motive (for example, "to chear mankind"); an intellectual conviction about life (for example, about how time is shaped—and here we come closest to Lovejoy's kind of unit idea; and a formal notion of the shape that a literary or philosophical work should be given. Though sometimes these are distinguished, they finally are combined.

No doubt things would be easier for us if Abrams could tell his history as a simple chronological account. But he cannot, must not, tell a simple story: "First there was X and then there was Y." (pp. 157-58)

Instead, for his complex purposes, the story must be scrambled, "organized as a sequence of movements out of and back to various passages" in Wordsworth's Prospectus…. A good example of how this works is seen in the short history of theodicy that places for us Wordsworth's own effort to justify Nature's ways. In twenty-five pages Abrams manages to explain, first, what a theodicy is; then, why there have been so many of them and why creating a new one was important ("Wordsworth announces that he is intent 'to weigh / The good and evil of our mortal state.' This was his version of Milton's undertaking to justify the ways of God to men"); and then what the place of Wordsworth's theodicy was in "the distinctive Romantic genre of the Bildungsgeschichte." He then classifies and traces its elements: "The Theodicy of the Landscape," for example, is traced backward through the eighteenth-century interest in the sublime and beautiful; on back to Chaucer ("This is precisely the question put to God by Dorigen in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale when …"—and after two paragraphs one must agree: it is precisely the question put by Dorigen!); then forward to Thomas Burnet; onward further, again in the eighteenth century, to Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into … the Sublime and Beautiful; and then on to Wordsworth, who receives, as he should, as many paragraphs as all the others put together, but who can now be discussed with easy references backward to Burnet and to the Bible (especially the Book of Revelation, with its mountains and rocks and days of wrath: "The Scriptural Apocalypse is assimilated to an apocalypse of nature"); to Milton again; far forward, to Wordsworth's Kafka-esque nightmares"; far backward (obliquely), by reference to "the dark night of the soul"; forward to the "art of landscape painting"; back to Paradise Lost, "this time echoing Milton's relief, in his invocation to the third book, at escaping the realms of hell, 'though long detain'd / In that obscure sojourn.' In Wordsworth's version…."

But see what he has now brought us to: Wordsworth's poem is by now clearly to be considered as a "version"! And on we go, to Wordsworth's "resolution of his long dialectic of good and evil," with reference backward to Christianity and then to Adam's "climactic statement in the last book of Milton's epic," with ample quotations from Wordsworth, now steeped for us in the language of the tradition in which he is working.

Though this summary risks sounding chaotic, what it shows at work is a skillful spiral history-by-accretion. Throughout the passage, our attention is ostensibly on reading Wordsworth fully; but we are learning the story at the same time, and finally we cannot say which is more important, the story or the explication of Wordsworth's poems. Each of them carries conviction about the value of Wordsworth's attempt. (pp. 158-59)

A defense of artistic quality by placement in a tradition? There is surely something odd here. I seem to be saying that Natural Supernaturalism offers us a way to answer questions in the form "Why is this poem better than, or even greater than, that poem?" Abrams performs literary criticism through history, though he never quite tells us that he has done so.

No influential critic I know of has ever suggested anything but the impossibility of such a demonstration. Demonstrations of value are either (1) impossible, or (2) they are performed by "intrinsic" criticism only and could never be arrived at through tracing "extrinsic" origins and consequences, or (3) if they are to be established on extrinsic grounds, the demonstration must be by systematic argument of the kind by which general values are established, and history as such is not that kind of argument. In other words, I may be able to show that a sonnet by Wordsworth is excellent in the sense of being well made, beautifully integrating its elements into a more impressive whole than some sonnet I might toss off in the next five minutes; but as soon as I move from such intrinsic investigation, I am driven to one of the "extrinsic" modes.

We have no canon of those modes; but Abrams' own chart, which accompanied the opening statement of his pluralistic assumptions in The Mirror and the Lamp …, will serve us well here. Taking intrinsic studies of the objective "work itself" as center, he traced three other modes: pragmatic, expressive, and imitative…. In this scheme, what are my possible directions if I abandon the "center"?

1. I can evaluate effects upon audiences (rhetorical or affective criticism). To do so, I must find some way to argue about the relative value of different "pragmatic" effects, showing why, say, I value more a poem that makes me cut myself while shaving than a poem that makes me wonder about the ironies of life, or one that makes me a better man, or one that leads me to a disinterested contemplation of form. To argue my case, I shall be forced to construct a general theory of human life into which my ranking of values can be fitted and thus established.

2. I can evaluate the quality of poets' lives, their genius, their creative skill, their imagination, or their craft. But to do so I must develop a general theory about human life according to which the superior value of some kinds of "expressive" genius or talent or personality can be established.

3. I can evaluate the intellectual or moral or psychological or political worlds or truths or realities that are imitated in the poem. Is a poem stating that the view from Westminster Bridge is as fair as anything on earth inherently superior to a poem giving a true picture of the revolutionary situation or a poem doing justice to the heart of darkness—assuming an equality of craft? To argue that it is, I must again develop a general theory about human life that will establish my ranking of poetic worlds. (pp. 159-60)

[If] I see his book aright, Abrams has achieved in Natural Supernaturalism a kind of "extrinsic" validation that adds at least one [mode] to his list of three. It is a kind that uses explication de textes, but the book as a whole is a marvelous piece of exegesis outward rather than explication inward. Never before practiced in quite this form (though of course it depends on the work of many previous historians), it is finally a mode of criticism that proves a poem's greatness by discovering what kind of historical account you can give of it—both of what went into it and of what came out. Abrams has thus found a way of doing literary history that shows not only the historical importance of Wordsworth's poetry—what everyone would allow that literary history can do—but its poetic or aesthetic value as well.

Obviously, such criticism will not work except on those poems it will work on; it will work only if we become convinced that the poems do in fact embody and transform great themes and great motives found in a great past. If we can come to believe that the greatness was really "out there" and that Wordsworth has created its incarnation, the new trick has succeeded. The value of the poetry is now inescapably in the facts of the case.

If the story had failed—if Abrams in trying to show that these verses in fact are the heirs of this greatness had revealed himself as forcing the evidence, faking his connections, disguising his lack of proof with colorful assertion—the poetry would not have withstood the testing. But since the rhetoric of his history is overwhelmingly solid, since the poems yield, historically, what he claims that they yield, the valued "extrinsic" is proved to have been really in there all the while.

In short, the scandal is perpetrated: by telling a persuasive story—a story made up of dozens of "short stories" like the one I have just traced, a story that runs from Homer to a brief selection of authors in the mid-twentieth century—Abrams overwhelms my possible objections and leaves me convinced about at least ten kinds of ambitious propositions, many of them evaluative. (pp. 161-62)

What I have tried to describe, then, is a great work of what might be called epideictic history, a history designed to show forth the greatness of the phenomena it explains. Wordsworth's period and Wordsworth's poetry—more specifically The Prelude and most specifically the Prospectus—the quality that was theirs and the historical importance of that quality, the quality that is found not only in the technical mastery but in the meaning, the meaning as consciously intended by Wordsworth but also the added significance that time has granted as the world moved into modernism—all this, I am saying, is demonstrated in Abrams' work. Not proved exactly, in most senses of the word; not demonstrated at all if demonstration must be univocal, indubitable, replicable. Rather, the theses have been shown forth, in dense detail, and with a splendid mastery of ordination both historical and analytical. (p. 163)

Wayne C. Booth, "M. H. Abrams: History As Criticism and the Plurality of Histories" (originally published in a different form in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 3, Spring, 1976), in his Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press; © 1979 by The University of Chicago), University of Chicago Press, 1979, pp. 139-94.