Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Occasional Poetics in the Early Modern Lyric

   • John Dolan

   Pages 1-17

3. ‘Pardon, Blest Soul, the Slow Pac’d Elegies’: Ambition and Occasion in Justa Edovardo King

   • John Dolan

   Pages 18-55

4. Carrion Crows: Occasion in the Beginning and End of Dryden’s Literary Life

   • John Dolan

   Pages 56-86

5. Nadir: the Generation of Namur and the Famine of Occasions

   • John Dolan

   Pages 87-121

6. ‘To Darkness and to Me’: Mental Event as Poetic Occasion

   • John Dolan

   Pages 122-147

7. Gray to Cowper: Cat to Cast-away via ‘Night Thoughts’

   • John Dolan

   Pages 148-190

8. Conclusion: the Deployment of the New-Modelled Lyric by Wordsworth

   • John Dolan

   Pages 191-201

9. Back Matter

   Pages 202-219

   PDF

John Dolan takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasising the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasion. This book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

• Elegie
• lyric
• poetics
• poetry
• reformation
• Wordsworth

'This most readable study of literary history not only reveals the well springs of Romanticism in eighteenth-century poetry but, like all thoughtful rhetorical analyses, sheds new light on writers and readers, on their creative and interpretative impulses.' - Professor Thomas O. Sloane, University of California, Berkeley

• University of Otago, New Zealand

  John Dolan

JOHN DOLAN is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand (1993 to date). From 1985 to 1992 he was lecturer in the Rhetoric Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He has published scholarly work on eighteenth-century poetry and prose, and on twentieth-century poetry, especially the work of Wallace Stevens, as well as two books of poetry.

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