Joel Faflak

University of Western Ontario

          One of the most powerful statements in Romanticism is Demogorgon’s speech at the end of Act Four of Prometheus Unbound, which entreats us “to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (4.573-74). Earlier criticism took this as an injunction to wage creative resilience and resistance against sociohistorical adversity. This view tended to elide or ignore gender, sexual, racial, and class differences, an indifferent politics of imagination Romantic studies since worked hard to redress. More often than not such field reconstructions reflect their sociohistorical moment. But Romanticism in particular holds up and holds itself up as a rather uncanny mirror of whatever future our present demands. Shelley predicted as much at the end of A Defence of Poetry. But there’s the catch. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, the future is always avenir. It never exists except as it...

Kacie L. Wills

Illinois College

Samantha Matthews begins Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 (Oxford UP, 2020) with a definition of what she terms “albo-mania” or the “collective enthusiasm, usually short-lived” for the album in the 1820s and 1830s. As with other manias, Matthews alludes to the inherent disorder, the “excess” and “pathological passion” this term incites. In its efforts to recuperate album poetry, Matthews’ book examines the personal and institutional, the fashionable and pathological, the amateur and professional, the creative and authentic, and, ultimately, the complicated gender dynamics that characterize the album in this period. In her examination of these various facets of “albo-mania,” Matthews seeks to debunk the assumption that album poetry is “bad” poetry, that it is unoriginal and derivative in its form and content. Instead, Matthews suggests, album poetry is “distinctive and...

Kurtis Hessel

University of Colorado Boulder

In 1784, the astronomer William Herschel offered an early indication of how he would revise humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. Herschel famously proposed a cosmology characterized by depth and constant change, quite different from the fixed field of stars so long presumed to fill the heavens uniformly. To clarify his vision, he wrote in his “Account of Some Observations tending to investigate the Construction of the Heavens” that future astronomers would “look upon those regions into which we may now penetrate by means of such large telescopes, as a naturalist regards a rich extent of ground or chain of mountains, containing strata variously inclined and directed, as well as consisting of very different materials” [1]. Here, an analogy with contemporaneous geological theory helps to clarify a celestial conundrum: how to present the depth of the night sky to earthbound observers? Describing a formal...

Jeremy Noel-Tod
University of East Anglia
 

It’s easy to laugh at Wordsworth. Connoisseurs of parody will know J.K. Stephen’s sonnet on the poet’s ‘two voices’: one sublime, one ‘an old half-witted sheep’,

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep

And connoisseurs of radio comedy may know Sue Limb’s The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere, ‘An Everyday Story of Towering Genius’ which rewrites the early years at Grasmere as The Goon Show. The first episode opens with Dorothy Wordsmith rhapsodising, to appropriate sound effects, about being close to nature (‘the wind in your hair, the rain on your face’), only to be interrupted by brother William: ‘But we’re indoors, Dorothy’.

The common joke is that Wordsworth is, like lakes, wet: a solemnbore. Matthew Bevis’s Wordsworth’s Fun sets out to show that the poet’s uses of humour are, in...