Arnold's Poetic Landscapes

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Roper, Alan.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nature in literature.

Arnold, Matthew, 1822-1888--Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 268 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Johns Hopkins University Press 2019

Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press [1969]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Originally published in 1969. Alan Roper studies the degree to which Arnold achieved a unity of human significance and literal landscape. If landscape poetry is to rise above the level of what Roper calls "country contentments in verse," the poet cannot think and describe alternately; his thinking and describing must be a part of one another. That Matthew Arnold was aware of the difficulty in achieving the necessary unity becomes clear in his own criticism, which Roper examines along with a large and representative number of Arnold's poems. Considering the latter roughly in the order they were published—except for a fuller analysis of Empedocles on Etna, "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Thyrsis"—Roper follows important changes in Arnold's view of the function and nature of poetry as it emerged in the poems themselves. Basic to the author's critical method is a distinction between geographical sites and poetic landscapes. Focusing on the ways that Arnold and, to a lesser extent, the Augustan and Romantic poets before him untied thought and description, Roper adds a critical dimension to Arnold scholarship. Concerned not with the development of Arnold's ideas nor with their sources in classical antiquity and the Romantic period, he considers Arnold a self-conscious poet who, though sometimes successful, became increasingly unsuccessful in his efforts to imbue a landscape with meaning for individual or social man.

Contents:

Cover

Copyright

Contents

Preface

Method of Citation

Introduction

Arnold's Poetics

Varieties of Landscape Poetry

Landscape in 1849

Landscape in 1852

Mount Etna

The Cumnor Hills

Various Landscapes

Appendix: Arnold's Volumes of 1849, 1852, 1853, and 1867

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographical footnotes.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8018-1050-7

1-4214-3059-2

OCLC:

1117488400