Abbreviations 1. Formal intelligence: formalism, romanticism, and formalist criticism 2. Sketching verbal form: Blake's Political Sketches 3. The formings of simile: Coleridge's 'comparing power' 4. Revision as form: Wordsworth's drowned man 5. Heroic form: couplets, 'self', and Byron's Corsair 6. Teasing form: the crisis of Keats's last lyrics 7. Social form: Shelley and the determination of reading Notes Index.

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Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism

Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self and Poetry in The Major Works

K eats’s late poetic fragment, “This living hand,” initiates one half of the connection that Petrarch wants so fervently to achieve with Laura in the Rime sparse: the moment when the inviting hand of the lover meets the accepting hand of the beloved. With this salute, the beloved transforms from object to subject and the lover from subject to object, a reciprocal recognition that creates the intersubjectivity that is the ideal of love.1 Which half of this mutual gesture Keats’s poem performs is ambiguous, however: “This living hand” could represent the lover’s plea or the beloved’s response. The poem creates similar ambiguities in its dramatic setting and mood. In Keats’s poem, the plea for intersubjective recognition crosses an imagined boundary between life and death as in a liberating dream or a chilling nightmare. “This living hand” imagines its speaker’s death but also compels its addressee to do the same, in what Jonathan Culler has called a “sinister reciprocity.”2 In the Rime sparse, too, Petrarch usually imagines his hand meeting Laura’s only when one of them is dead.3 Keats’s poem implicitly contrasts its imagined deaths with a vitalizing touch, so that the proposed meeting of the hands carries both meanings of “salutare”: to greet and to save.4 As is also true for the Rime sparse, the connection initiated by the poet within the verse is contingent on the reader’s response in the poem’s afterlife. “This living hand” has long fascinated critics. Due to its textual history—the lines were found within the manuscript of Keats’s unfinished

Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura

That Shelley’s life at Lerici was marked by tensions and crises has been well noted. His estrangement from Mary was becoming increasingly severe; she herself had almost died in a miscarriage two days before this letter; the daughter of Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont, Allegra, had recently died; rumors of an affair between Shelley and Clairmont persisted. In the same letter, Shelley wrote that he detested almost all company, that Byron was ‘‘the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome in it,’’ and that he himself was too unhappy about the past and the future to give much attention to writing. During this period he was beset by hallucinations: he saw his own figure strangling Mary in her bed; he also saw ‘‘the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him—‘How long do you mean to be content?’ ’’ In this

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"More than ever can be spoken": Unconscious Fantasy in Shelley's Jane Williams Poems

It is a commonplace perhaps most memorably formulated by Jerome McGann that many of the most influential scholars, critics, and theorists of romanticism have had trouble fitting Byron into their conceptual paradigms.1 While M. H. Abrams's omission of the poet's work from Natural Supernaturalism (1971) remains probably the best-known example,2 comprehensive readings integrating Byron into the larger drama of romantic poetry and poetics are still, with some important exceptions, remarkably hard to find.3 In my own Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative (2006), I have tried to show how Byron might be located closer to the mainstream of modern literary tradition by considering his works from the standpoint of his experimentation with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "novelistic discourse," a phrase I take to be a loose translation of Friedrich Schlegel7 s notion of "romantische Poesie/'4 Nevertheless, Byron seems to be the poet certainly the major romantic who, as a poet, inspires in his readers the least amount of confidence.5 That is to say, if one experiences during the course of reading works by Wordsworth and Keats (or Dickinson and Whitman) the perpetual contemporaneousness of their discourse, Byron is all too often regarded as a poet of his time. To his credit, McGann has spent much of his career as a critic, theorist, and editor attempting to transform this weakness into strength by focusing on the historical and theoretical contexts that have

Byron's Orphic Poetics and the Foundations of Literary Modernism

One of the distinctive features of simile is that it can be extended beyond the dimensions of trope into the relatively autonomous mini-genre of its Homeric form. Thus, a study of the extended simile may offer some insights into the relationship between trope and genre. Homeric similes often interrupt a story quite significantly, representing a type of narrative embedding that has not so far been examined as such. Following on an earlier study, which examined the simile in relation to the literal-figurative dichotomy, this essay is an attempt to investigate the narrative implications of extending the simile, mainly from a reader's point of view. It also examines some of the narrative variations possible in extended simile by means of a brief survey of the Homeric tradition. In the earlier essay on simile, I pointed out that, whereas metaphor depends on a distinction between the literal and figurative in order to exist, simile transcends this antithesis by including not only figurative examples, which may be converted or abbreviated into metaphors, but also literal examples, which do not relate to metaphors at all. In fact, a sliding scale of "literalness" and "figurativeness" can be used to classify different simile types on a continuum. Simile is so versatile because, as Christine Brooke-Rose notes in A Grammar of Metaphor (14, 64-65), it is mainly defined by grammar. Brooke-Rose shows that its grammatical nature is what makes simile, and not metaphor, extensible. Unlike metaphors, which may be represented by any part of speech and which often, to adopt I. A. Richards's terminology (96), state only the vehicle, leaving the tenor a matter of implication, similes appear in a limited number of fixed grammatical forms and always state both of their terms; they also label their ter ms clearly by means of comparative tags. These comparative tags have the effect of marking a boundary between the vehicle's material and the main discourse. When we are told that "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" (Byron 82), the word "like" disconnects the wolf-sheep image (or mini-story) from the Assyrian-Israelite scene and story unfolding as the main topic of the poem. The tenor, "The Assyrian," is, in contrast, an important element of this topic. In longer similes, the single vehicular tags, "like" or "as," usually give way to the double markers, "just as" and "so" (and their cognates), to label and connect tenor with vehicle over significant textual distance. Occurring in many languages and often matching each other as in the Italian "quale ... tale," these tags are powerful framing devices, strong enough to hold in abeyance the main discourse even at moments of great tension or gravity. Within their framework, the vehicle is able to flesh out a world that is not the world of the main discourse, or tell a story that is not connected to the main narrative, more-or-less for its own sake. In an article on narrative framing, Marie-Laure Ryan distinguishes between "actually" and "virtually" crossed boundaries: "The narrative can cross a boundary, by selecting the "here" and "now" of the other side as points of reference, or can simply look through boundaries, by revealing what is beyond the line from the perspective of this side of the line. In this second case, the crossing of the boundary is only virtual" (874). This distinction is helpful in indicating what happens to the reader's central focus as similes are extended. Whereas many short similes invite only a "virtual" crossing of their boundaries, longer, especially Homeric-type, similes attempt to seduce the reader into a "real" crossing, one that reorientates her into a different universe from that of the main story or discourse. Just as "literalness and "figurativeness" are variable qualities, so some crossings may be "more real" or "more virtual" in comparison with others. In all the following similes, brevity is an important factor in the reader's experience: "Oh, my luve is like a red, red rose," "The holy time is quiet as a Nun," "As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend," "these who die as cattle," "Like a patient etherised upon a table" (Burns 562, Wordsworth 205, Hopkins 30, Owen 80, Eliot 13). …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.35.3.498

Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism

Citations

Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self and Poetry in The Major Works

Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura

"More than ever can be spoken": Unconscious Fantasy in Shelley's Jane Williams Poems

Byron's Orphic Poetics and the Foundations of Literary Modernism

"So Stretched Out Huge In Length": Reading the Extended Simile

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