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This book shows how rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry. Intervening in recent debates over formalism, historicism, and poetics, the authors show how rhythm is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. Distinct from the related terms to which it’s often assimilated—scansion, prosody, meter—rhythm makes legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory.Rhythm has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice and even identity. Through exploration of rhythm’s genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form offering ready-made resources for interpretation. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks’ isolated descriptions of technique or inductive declarations of what rhythm “is,” the essays ask what it means to think rhythm.Rhythm, the contributors show, happens relative to the body, on the one hand, and to language, on the other—two categories that are distinct from the literary, the mode through which poetics has tended to be analyzed. Beyond articulating what rhythm does to poetry, the contributors undertake a genealogical and theoretical analysis of how rhythm as a human experience has come to be articulated through poetry and poetics. The resulting work helps us better understand poetry both on its own terms and in its continuities with other experiences and other arts.Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins, Haun Saussy

Rhythm in literature. --- Poetics --- History --- Rhythm. --- Aesthetics --- Movement, Psychology of --- Cycles --- Movement, Aesthetics of --- History of Criticism. --- Lyric. --- Meter. --- Modernism. --- Poetics. --- Prosody. --- Romantic Poetry. --- Scansion. --- Victorian Poetry.

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This text considers William Wordsworth's use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion (1814). Through this iconographical approach, it steers a middle course between The Excursion's two very different interpretative traditions, the one focusing upon the poem's abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. The author explores Wordsworth's iconography in The Excursion by tracing cultural and political allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth's own prose and poetry, especially The Prelude. Particular attention is paid to the complex ways in which The Excursion's iconographical images contribute to - and also impose limitations upon - the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth's writings: the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context.

Allusions in literature. --- Symbolism in literature. --- English poetry --- Romanticism --- Imagery (Psychology) in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Wordsworth, William, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- William Wordsworth --- Romantic poetry --- landscape imagery --- political iconography --- French Revolution

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"John Keats was a trained surgeon who studied at Guy's Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected Keats manuscript: the notebook he maintained during this period. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats' intellectual and imaginative development, it seeks to show the intriguing connections between Keats' medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It offers new research on Keats' medical career -- including a new edition of his medical Notebook compiled from the manuscript -- and recovers the various ways in which Keats' creativity found expression in his two careers of medicine and poetry, enriching both. Topics explored include the 'hospital poems' Keats wrote at Guy's; the medical milieu of his daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context and Poems reveals how Keats' visceral knowledge of human life, gained during his medical training at Guy's, transformed him into 'a mighty poet of the human heart'."--

Medicine and literature. --- Physicians as authors --- Literature and medicine --- History --- Keats, John, --- Keats, John, --- Keats, John, --- Knowledge and learning. --- Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. --- Criticism and interpretation. --- 1800-1899 --- England. --- John Keats --- Keats manuscript --- history of medicine --- Romantic poetry --- Guy's Hospital

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This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems-grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world-chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.

American poetry. --- American literature --- 20th century poets. --- american poets. --- american. --- beat movement. --- beat poets. --- beauty. --- book club reads. --- california. --- controversial. --- essential collection. --- famous poets. --- humanity. --- imaginative. --- introduction to poetry. --- inventive. --- japanese haiku. --- modernism. --- natural world. --- nature poems. --- poem sequence. --- poems. --- poetic landscape. --- poetry collection. --- radical poetry. --- romantic poetry. --- romanticism. --- san francisco. --- six gallery reading. --- surrealist poetry. --- visionary work.

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This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emerges as a unique structure of feeling simultaneously with new theories of lyric poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He then explores the intertwining of poetic experimentation and infancy in Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Augusta Webster. Each chapter addresses andanalyzes a specific moment in a writers’ work, moments of tenderness or mourning, birth or death, physical or mental illness, when infancy is analogized, eulogized, or theorized. Moving between canonical and archival materials, and combining textual and inter-textual reading, metrical and prosodic analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the book shows how poetic engagements with infancy anticipate psychoanalytic and phenomenological (i.e. modern) ways of being in the world. Ultimately, Rudermansuggests that it is not so much that we return to infancy as that infancy returns (obsessively, compulsively) in us. This book shows how by tracking changing attitudes towards the idea of infancy, one might also map the emotional, political, and aesthetic terrain of nineteenth-century culture. It will be of interest to scholars in the areas of British romanticism and Victorianism, as well as 19th-century American literature and culture, histories of childhood, and representations of the child from art historical, cultural studies, and literary perspectives. "D. B. Ruderman’s The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form is an interesting contribution to this field, and it manages to bring a new perspective to our understanding of Romantic-era and Victorian representations of infancy and childhood. …a supremely exciting book that will be a key work for generations of readers of nineteenth-century poetry." Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Victorian Studies (59.4)

English poetry --- Infants in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Anna Barbauld --- Augusta Webster --- Ballad --- British Literature --- British Poetry --- British Romanticism --- Childhood --- Coleridge --- Erasmus Darwin --- Infancy --- Literature --- Lyric Poetry --- Matthew Arnold --- Nineteenth Century Poetry --- Pastoral --- Poetics --- Psychoanalytic Theory --- Research --- Romanticism --- Romantic Poetry --- Sara Coleridge --- Shelley --- Sublime --- Tennyson --- William Blake --- Wordsworth