Conversing in Verse
Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry
Published on 28. July 2022
218 pages
978-1-009-20021-9 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'When I follow Helsinger's knowledge of poetic genres and nineteenth-century poetry through these chapters and think about the conversations she is having with these poems - that she is reading into them - the book sparkles with excitement and refreshing perspective.' Meredith Martin, Victorian StudiesMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
File size
0,00 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-009-20021-9 (9781009200219)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
08/2022
Cambridge University Press
€108.30
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Content
1. Introduction: A Poetics of Encounter; 2. Dialogue and the Idyll: Tennyson and Landor; 3. Performing Conversation: Swinburne and Robert Browning; 4. Projects of Animation: Coleridge and Clare; 5. Ecphrastic Questions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Michael Field; 6. Cruel Intimacies: Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy; Epilogue: Louise Glueck's Secret Conversations.
