Unfettering Poetry

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century.

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer a compelling new reading of British Romanticism. Matthew Ward reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics.

The later poetry of William Wordsworth, popular in his lifetime and influential on the Victorians, has, with a few exceptions, received little attention from contemporary literary critics. In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that the later work reveals a mature poet far more varied and surprising than is often acknowledged. Examining the most characteristic poems in their historical contexts, he shows Wordsworth probing the experiences and perspectives of later life and innovating formally and stylistically. He demonstrates how Wordsworth modified his writing in light of conversations with younger poets and learned to acknowledge his debt to women in ways he could not as a young man. The older Wordsworth emerges in Fulford's depiction as a love poet of companionate tenderness rather than passionate lament. He also appears as a political poet—bitter at capitalist exploitation and at a society in which vanity is rewarded while poverty is blamed. Most notably, he stands out as a history poet more probing and more clear-sighted than any of his time in his understanding of the responsibilities and temptations of all who try to memorialize the past.

This book offers a major reassessment of John Clare’s poetry and his position in the Romantic canon. Alert to Clare’s knowledge of the work of his Romantic contemporaries and near contemporaries, it puts forward the first extended series of comparisons of Clare’s poetry with texts we now think of as defining the period – in particular poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats. It makes fully evident Clare’s original contribution to the aesthetic culture of the age by analysing how he explores a wide range of concerns and preoccupations which are central to, and especially privileged in, Romantic-period poetics, including ‘fancy’, the sublime, childhood, ruins, joy, ‘poesy’, and a love lyric marked by a peculiar self-consciousness about sincere expression. At the heart of this book is the claim that the hitherto under-scrutinised subjective stances, transcendent modes, and abstract qualities of Clare’s lyric poetry situate him firmly within, and as fundamentally part of, Romanticism, at the same time as his writing constitutes a distinctive contribution to one of the most fascinating eras of English literature.

Found poems are a form of collage, where the poet imparts new meaning to words or phrases from other sources by rearranging and changing lines and spacing, adding or deleting text. The poems in this collection include ekphrastic collages (inspired by other works of art, from Shakespeare to Charlie Mingus), centos from lines and titles of poets from Maxine Kumin to Dylan Thomas, and erasure poems from novels, biographies, and unexpected sources such as an astronomy text and online dictionary.

Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840 provides the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction; poetry; drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the relationship between literature and architecture is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains, to date, no monograph-length study of the intriguing and complex interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only the most cursory of treatments in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. In addressing this gap in contemporary scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic-architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of canonical and lesser-known texts and writers. Correspondingly, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were to a certain extent shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its 'survivalist' and 'revivalist' forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was always much more than a matter of style. Incarnating, for better or for worse, the memory of a vanished 'Gothic' age in the modern, enlightened present, Gothic architecture, be it ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation's past—a notable 'visionary' turn, as the antiquary John Pinkerton put it in 1788, in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. The volume establishes a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, and argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley takes stock of current developments in the study of a major Romantic poet and prose-writer, and seeks to advance Shelley studies in new directions. It consists of forty-two chapters written by an international cast of established and emerging scholar-critics. This Handbook is divided into five thematic sections: Biography and Relationships; Prose; Poetry; Cultures, Traditions, Influences; and Afterlives. The first section reappraises Shelley's life and relationships, including those with his publishers through whom he sought to reach an audience for the 'Ashes and sparks' of his thought, and with women, creative collaborators as well as muse-figures. The second section gives his under-investigated prose works detailed attention, bringing multiple perspectives to bear on his conceptual positions, and demonstrating the range of his achievement in prose works from novels to political and poetic treatises. The third section explores Shelley's creativity and gift as a poet, emphasizing his capacity to excel in many different poetic genres. The fourth section looks at Shelley's response to past and present literary cultures, both English and international, and at his immersion in science, music, theatre, the visual arts, and travel. The fifth section concludes the volume by analysing Shelley's literary and cultural afterlife, from his influence on Victorians and Moderns, to his status as the exemplary poet for Deconstruction. Packed with stimulating insights and readings, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley brings out the relevance to Shelley's own work of his dictum that 'All high poetry is infinite' .

Regularly the subject of cartoonists and satirical novelists, Mary Robinson achieved public notoriety as the mistress of the young Prince of Wales (George IV). Her association with figures such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and comparisons with Charlotte Smith, make her a serious figure for scholarly research.