1st Edition

The Meaning of Life in Romantic Poetry and Poetics

By Ross Wilson Copyright 2009
    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume brings together an impressive range of established and emerging scholars to investigate the meaning of ‘life’ in Romantic poetry and poetics. This investigation involves sustained attention to a set of challenging questions at the heart of British Romantic poetic practice and theory. Is poetry alive for the Romantic poets? If so, how? Does ‘life’ always mean ‘life’? In a range of essays from a variety of complementary perspectives, a number of major Romantic poets are examined in detail. The fate of Romantic conceptions of ‘life’ in later poetry also receives attention. Through, for examples, a revision of Blake’s relationship to so-called rationalism, a renewed examination of Wordsworth’s fascination with country graveyards, an exploration of Shelley’s concept of survival, and a discussion of the notions of ‘life’ in Byron, Kierkegaard, and Mozart, this volume opens up new and exciting terrain in Romantic poetry’s relation to literary theory, the history of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.

    Table of contents

    Introduction Ross Wilson

    1. Blake’s Spiritual Body Simon Jarvis

    2. Wordsworth, Gray, and the Ordinary Life of Poetry  Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig

    3. Wordsworth’s Itinerant Responsiveness: The Life of a Subject in ‘Tintern

    Abbey’ and other texts Richard Eldridge

    4. Coleridge and Life-Writing  Paul Hamilton

    5. Keats’s Living Hand: The Gift of Death David Ferris

    6. Shelley and Survival Ross Wilson

    7. Don Juan / Don Giovanni: music, poetry and the reproduction of life Corinna Russell 

    8. Later-Modernist Afterlives: Posthumous Careers for the ‘Life’ of

    Romantic Poetry Robert Kaufman

    Biography

    Ross Wilson is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His works Subjective Universality in Kant’s Aesthetics (Lang) and Theodor Adorno (Routledge) appeared in 2007.