Conversing in verse : conversation in nineteenth-century English poetry / Elizabeth K. Helsinger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Helsinger, Elizabeth K., 1943- author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--19th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Conversation in literature.

Poetics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 200 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

System Details:

Mode of Access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

Conversing in Verse considers poems of conversation from the late eighteenth into the twentieth centuries - the very period when a more restrictive conception of poetry as the lyric product of the poet's solitary self-communing became entrenched. With fresh insight, Elizabeth Helsinger addresses a range of questions at the core of conversational poetry: When and why do poets turn to conversation to explore poetry's potential? How do conversation's forms and intentions shape the figures, rhythms, and prosody of poems to alter the reader's experience? What are the ethical and political stakes of conversing in verse? Coleridge, Clare, Landor, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, Michael Field, and Hardy each composed poems that open difficult or impossible conversations with phenomena outside themselves. Helsinger unearths an unfamiliar lyric history that produced some of the most interesting formal experiments of the nineteenth century, including its best known, the dramatic monologue.

Contents:

Introduction: A Poetics of Encounter

Dialogue and the Idyll: Tennyson and Landor

Performing Conversation: Swinburne and Robert Browning

Projects of Animation: Coleridge and Clare

Ecphrastic Questions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Michael Field

Cruel Intimacies: Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy

Epilogue: Louise Glück's Secret Conversations.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 25 Jul 2022).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781009200189 (ebook)

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.