The perversity of poetry : romantic ideology and the popular male poet of genius / / Dino Franco Felluga

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910808348403321
• Autore: Felluga Dino Franco <1966->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Albany, : State University of New York Press, c2005
• ISBN: 0-7914-8397-5; 1-4237-4365-2
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (221 p.)
• Disciplina: 821/.7099286
• Soggetti: English poetry - Male authors - History and criticism; Popular literature - Great Britain - History and criticism; English poetry - 19th century - History and criticism; Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.); Romanticism - Great Britain; Masculinity in literature; Genius in literature; Men in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-198) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front Matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Diagnosing Genius -- Romanticism’S Last Minstrel -- Byron’s Spectropoetics and Revolution -- Poetry and Pathology -- Coda -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: Once the dominant literary form, poetry was gradually eclipsed by the realist novel; indeed, by 1940 W. H. Auden was able to note, "Poetry makes nothing happen." 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 period'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.