The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • David Stewart

   Pages 1-18

3. ‘The Genius of the Times’: Sales, Forms, and Periods

   • David Stewart

   Pages 19-63

4. ‘Infinite Profit in a Little Book’: Ephemerality and the Annuals

   • David Stewart

   Pages 65-90

5. ‘A Labyrinth of Difficulties and Distinctions’: Landon, Darley, Browning

   • David Stewart

   Pages 91-125

6. ‘A Fatal Gift’: Formal Apparitions in Hemans and Beddoes

   • David Stewart

   Pages 127-160

7. ‘The Proper Pathetic Face’: Hunt, Reynolds, Hood, Praed

   • David Stewart

   Pages 161-197

8. A Living Doubt: Clare and Hartley

   • David Stewart

   Pages 199-225

9. Conclusion: From Byron to Tennyson

   • David Stewart

   Pages 227-239

10. Back Matter

    Pages 241-269

    PDF

The 1820s and 1830s, the gap between Romanticism and Victorianism, continues to prove a difficulty for scholars. This book explores and recovers a neglected culture of poetry in those years, and it demonstrates that culture was a crucial turning point in literary history. It explores a uniquely wide range of poets, including the poetry of the literary annuals, Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Hood and John Clare, placing their work in the light of new research into the conditions of the literary market. In turn, it uses that culture to open up wider theoretical issues relating to literary form, book history, print culture, gender and periodisation. The period’s doubt about poetry’s place in culture and its capacity to last prompted a dazzling range of creative experiments that reimagined the metrical, material and commercial forms of poetry.

• Publishing
• Literary market
• Poetic form
• Print culture
• Gender
• Periodization
• Romanticism
• Victorianism
• British and Irish Literature

“David Stewart’s The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s answers a real need: a comprehensive study, as well as survey, of the large number of poets once either obscure or dismissed as rubbish. … The result in this work is a tour-de-force of research—not only of unearthing less well-known voices, but of interpreting them through a coherent lens.” (James Najarian, European Romantic Review, Vol. 30 (4), 2019)

“This thoroughly engaging book shows how literary posterity’s awkward burden of ‘rescuing’ poets like Beddoes, Clare, Darley, and Landon from their perceived obscurity can be transformed into an illuminating discourse of doubt and self-awareness. Stewart helps us to see in these poets’ exquisitely accomplished writing a questioning of the present moment, even as it unfolds and takes flight.” (Michael Bradshaw, John Clare Society Journal, Issue 37, June, 2018)

• Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

  David Stewart

David Stewart is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Northumbria University, UK, where he has worked since 2009. He is the author of Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Palgrave, 2011), and articles published in journals including Essays in Criticism, Review of English Studies and Studies in English Literature.

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