Browse

Is a Darwinian universe necessarily a godless one? What might Darwinism tell us about the nature of God? Is Darwinism compatible with immortality, and if not, how can we face death or the loss of those we love? This book explores the ways in which some of the most perceptive and powerful British and American poets of the last 150 years have grappled with the questions raised by Darwinism, from Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy, through Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay, to Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Amy Clampitt and Edwin Morgan. Many of the poets referred to in the book are still alive and writing today. Poets have been responding to Charles Darwin and his ideas ever since The Origin of Species was first published 150 years ago. The book discusses the historical development of Darwinism and the poetry that goes alongside it, and is particularly concerned with how that poetry can help us to come to terms with Darwinism today. What is our own place in the Darwinian universe, and our ecological role here on earth? How does our kinship with other animals affect how we see them? How does the fact that we are animals ourselves alter how we think about our own desires, love, and sexual morality? All told, is life in a Darwinian universe grounds for celebration or despair?

This is the first book that exclusively attends to the Decadent poetry and poetics of the British fin de siècle. It explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in Decadence by examining, together for the first time, the work of three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. In its overarching argument the book highlights an exasperating yet productive paradox that lies at the heart of Decadent poetics. On the one hand Decadence venerates the inaccessible, representational realm of artificiality; on the other hand it relishes sensuous experience in its immediacy as it is advocated by Walter Pater. This paradox is expressed in erotic encounters with statues, ‘soulless’ women, fetishes, landscapes, dead bodies, and texts. These encounters, the book suggests, develop in three stages: Wilde’s early and middle period poetry showcases the sensuality circumscribed in the frozen surface of art. With Symons the erotic encounter with artificiality reaches its apex as it is elevated to a fragmented, urban experience. In Dowson, through images of death, isolation and exhaustion, these encounters remain unrealised tragic possibilities. The book sees these Decadent poems as sites where the self, in the context of transgression, tends to become sensually immersed in and with their art and artifice. Aesthetic appreciation turns into Decadent participation in a foredoomed erotic experience ultimately with the very texture of language itself.

The only book on Hugh MacDiarmid currently in print, this study gives unique focus to the politics of one of modern Scotland’s major cultural figures. By examining at length those places in Scotland that inspired MacDiarmid to produce his best poetry, it shows how the poet’s politics evolved from his interaction with the nation, exploring how MacDiarmid discovered a hidden tradition of radical Scottish Republicanism through which he sought to imagine a new Scottish future. The author analyses recently available government files from the National Archives showing that MacDiarmid was watched by the Security Services from 1931 to 1943. Adapting postcolonial theory, the book allows readers a fuller understanding not only of MacDiarmid’s poetry and politics, but also of international modernism, and the social history of Scottish modernism.

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats' intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. The book re-examines some of Keats' most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats' poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. The book contributes to one of the most important current debates in literary scholarship — the understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.

This book analyses the remaking of lyric poetry in Victorian modernity, challenging and transforming existing narratives of the modern formation of the ‘lyric’ genre through engagement with a body of work that larger-scale genre histories elide. As cultural and philosophical shifts were challenging the fundamental generic identity of ‘lyric’, aestheticist poets seemed to turn insistently to forms from the past. Yet might those antique forms be understood in relation to the pressures of modernity? How might they have been used to reimagine lyric‘s presence in the modern world? This book argues that aestheticist poetry (c. 1860 to 1914) responds profoundly to the crisis of lyric’s relevance to a rapidly modernizing age, not in spite of these forms but through them. Setting its focal poetry within broader conceptual frames, and featuring innovative analysis of both recently rediscovered and canonical works, this study asks us to reimagine the relationship between poetry and modernity. The book provides three fresh frames through which to do this, and includes case studies featuring A. C. Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and a host of other Decadent and aestheticist voices.