ИСТИНА

The aim of the paper is to test a reading of Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” against “Natural Supernaturalism”, a systematic inquiry into the patterns of Romantic thinking by M.H. Abrams. Abrams takes “patterns” aesthetically and philosophically, and his primary interest lies in the way they are displaced into new contexts and, consequently, change their cognitive range. He defines Romanticism through “naturalization”, or “secularization”, of religious plots and metaphors in the aftermath of the French Revolution in politics and the German revolution in philosophy. The paper may contribute to the discussion of “Victorian patterns” in several ways: 1. Abrams considers the first generation of Romantics and briefly develops some interesting lines of his argument through Modernism to counter-culture. Is his synthetical view applicable to Victorian poetry which is conspicuously absent in the book? 2. Is his argument built mostly on lyrical poetry and various kinds of philosophical essayism valid for “objective” poetry that Browning experimented with? 3. Is it possible to find in “The Ring and the Book” any particular patterns that Abrams identifies with Romanticism? Drawing mainly but not exclusively on the lyrical paradigm of the poem (books I, XII) I will discuss a) the author’s account of the composition of the poem as a journey of the self between the stations of alienation and higher self-consciousness; b) the tension between “optics” and “vision”, material and imaginative perception; c) imagination as the primary agent of secular revelation and redemption.