Unfettering Poetry

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century.

'Unfettering Poetry will unsettle, excite and inspire all students and scholars of Romanticism. Challenging Coleridge's hierarchy of poetic faculties, Jeffrey Robinson presents a brilliant argument for the Fancy as the most spirited, searching and experimental form of Romantic writing- the source of a vital counter-poetics that continues to the present. Robinson redraws the landscape of Romantic literary culture and the scholarly/critical tradition; highlights the Della Cruscans, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans and Leigh Hunt as key proponents of the New Romantic Poetics; and enables us to read those poets alongside the canonical Wordsworth and Keats with fresh eyes and enhanced understanding.' - Nicholas Roe, University of St Andrews, Scotland

'Jeffrey C. Robinson's new book rethinks the shifting, often contradictory Romantic concept of 'fancy' in ways that release it from its traditional positioning as the degraded and impoverished sibling of a privileged 'imagination.' By attending with a fresh eye to Romantic critical discourse and to poetic practices based upon continuing investments in the agency of 'fancy,' Robinson is able to offer surprising readings of texts that range from the fragility of lyrical self-discovery to the compelling drama of boxing. As a poet himself, Robinson writes with a fellow practitioner's feel for the often elusive interaction of verbal exploration and historical circumstance. This is a book that everyone who cares about British Romantic culture will be eager to read.' William Keach, Brown University

'Since his stunning book of 1987, Radical Literary Education, no one has done more than Jeffrey Robinson to define the immediate need we always have for poetry. Though its subject matter is some 200 years old, this new book is about poetry and poetics in what Gertrude Stein would call its continuing present. It is, in its own words, an 'experimental poetics both for the history of British Romanticism and for the later history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.' It is a book to wake its neighbours up.' - Jerome McGann, University of Virginia

JEFFREY C. ROBINSON has published widely in the area of British Romanticism. He is a recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, and at the University of Colorado-Boulder, USA, where he has taught since 1971, he has received the University's Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work Award and the Hazel Barnes Price for distinction in research and teaching.