A Companion to Romantic Poetry

It has never been possible to adequately define either Romanticism or Romantic poetry. There are no uncontested dates with which to delimit the period historically; neither is there an essential set of qualities which makes a poem unequivocally Romantic. Beyond argument, however, is the critical role that Romantic poetry has played and continues to play in evaluations of the achievements of British poetry. The elusive nature of the period has meant that, historically, the study of Romantic poetry has been organised around just six canonical figures –– Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats –– and structured in terms of the categories generated by their works alone. Today our sense of both the achievements and the possibilities of Romantic poetry is far more expansive. This collection of 34 provocative new essays attests to the remarkable diversity of the period and encourages us to take a different approach to this body of work by refocusing our attention on the revitalised matters of form, metre, and genre.

List of Illustrations viii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgments xiv Introduction 1 Charles Mahoney Part I Forms and Genres 7 1 Mournful Ditties and Merry Measures: Feeling and Form in the Romantic Short Lyric and Song 9 Michael O’Neill 2 Archaist–Innovators: The Couplet from Churchill to Browning 25 Simon Jarvis 3 The Temptations of Tercets 44 Charles Mahoney 4 To Scorn or To “Scorn not the Sonnet” 62 Daniel Robinson 5 Ballad Collection and Lyric Collectives 78 Steve Newman 6 Satire, Subjectivity, and Acknowledgment 95 William Flesch 7 “Stirring shades”: The Romantic Ode and Its Afterlives 107 Esther Schor 8 Pastures New and Old: The Romantic Afterlife of Pastoral Elegy 123 Christopher R. Miller 9 The Romantic Georgic and the Work of Writing 140 Tim Burke 10 Shepherding Culture and the Romantic Pastoral 159 John Bugg 11 Ear and Eye: Counteracting Senses in Loco–descriptive Poetry 176 Adam Potkay Part II Production and Distribution, Schools and Movements 195 12 “Other voices speak”: The Poetic Conversations of Byron and Shelley 197 Simon Bainbridge 13 The Thrush in the Theater: Keats and Hazlitt at the Surrey Institution 217 Sarah M. Zimmerman 14 Laboring–Class Poetry in the Romantic Era 234 Michael Scrivener 15 Celtic Romantic Poetry: Scotland, Ireland, Wales 251 Jane Moore 16 Anglo–Jewish Romantic Poetry 268 Karen Weisman 17 Leigh Hunt’s Cockney Canon: Sociability and Subversion from Homer to Hyperion 285 Michael Tomko 18 Poetry, Conversation, Community: Annus Mirabilis, 1797–1798 302 Emily Sun Part III Contemporary Contexts and Perspectives 319 19 Spontaneity, Immediacy, and Improvisation in Romantic Poetry 321 Angela Esterhammer 20 Celebrity, Gender, and the Death of the Poet: The Mystery of Letitia Elizabeth Landon 337 Ghislaine McDayter 21 Poetry and Illustration: “Amicable strife” 354 Sophie Thomas 22 Romanticism, Sport, and Late Georgian Poetry 374 John Strachan 23 “The science of feelings”: Wordsworth’s Experimental Poetry 393 Ross Hamilton 24 Romanticism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism 412 Laura Quinney 25 Milton and the Romantics 425 Gordon Teskey Part IV Critical Issues and Current Debates 443 26 “The feel of not to feel it,” or the Pleasures of Enduring Form 445 Anne–Lise François 27 Romantic Poetry and Literary Theory: The Case of “A slumber did my spirit seal” 467 Marc Redfield 28 “Strange utterance”: The (Un)Natural Language of the Sublime in Wordsworth’s Prelude 483 Timothy Bahti 29 The Matter of Genre in the Romantic Sublime 503 Ian Balfour 30 Sexual Politics and the Performance of Gender in Romantic Poetry 521 James Najarian 31 Blake’s Jerusalem: Friendship with Albion 538 Karen Swann 32 The World without Us: Romanticism, Environmentalism, and Imagining Nature 554 Bridget Keegan 33 Ethical Supernaturalism: The Romanticism of Wordsworth, Heaney, and Lacan 572 Guinn Batten 34 The Persistence of Romanticism 589 Willard Spiegelman Index 606

Charles Mahoney is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is the author of Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction (2003), the editor of Leigh Hunt, Later Literary Essays (2003), and co–editor, with Michael O′Neill, of Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Wiley–Blackwell, 2008).

"Comprising 625 pages and very nicely produced, it represents good value, and I believe that many of these thirty–four excellent essays will be consulted for years to come . . . It should interest a wide range of scholars and encourage them to find new ways of understanding, questioning, and celebrating its poetic legacy." (Review 19, 2011) "With such a variety of content and depth of literary study, The Companion to Romantic Poetry should be of interest to general readers and students seeking an inspiring introduction to the poets of the romantic era, but also more informed scholars looking for a different perspective." (Reference Reviews, 2011) "This volume is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate study, providing a refreshing take on many conventional areas of Romantic scholarship whilst also introducing a welcome number of new perspectives on this diverse and fascinating literary genre." (Routledge ABES, 2011) "Up to date and rich in foundations, this will be useful to students at any level. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers." (Choice, 1 July 2011)