The perversity of poetry : romantic ideology and the popular male poet of genius
"In The Perversity of Poetry, Dino Franco Felluga explores the cultural background of poetry's marginalization by examining nineteenth-century reactions to Romantic poetry and ideology. Focusing on the work of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, as well as periodical reviews, student manuals, and contemporary medical journals, the book details the periods's two contending (and equally outrageous) claims regarding poetry. Scott's poetry, on the one hand, was continually represented as a panacea for a modern world overtaken by new principles of utilitarianism, capitalism, industrialism, and democracy. Byron's by contrast, was represented either as a cancer in the heart of the social order or as a contagious pandemic leading to various pathological symptoms. The book concludes with a coda on Alfred Lord Tennyson, which illustrates how the Victorian reception of Scott and Byron affected the most popular poetic genius of midcentury. Ultimately, The Perversity of Poetry uncovers how the shift to a rhetoric of health allowed critics to oppose what they perceived as a potent and potentially dangerous influence on the age, the very thing that would over the course of the century be marginalized into such obscurity: poetry, thanks to its perverse insistence on making something happen."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2005
State University of New York Press, Albany, ©2005
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xi, 208 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780791462997, 9780791463000, 0791462994, 0791463001
54425119
1. Diagnosing genius : the tropic and the constitution of the man of letters
2. Romanticism's last minstrel : Scott, ideological fetishes, and the technology of the book
3. Byron's spectropoetics and revolution
4. Poetry and pathology
Coda : Tennyson's Idylls, pure poetry, and the market
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