To begin with recapitulation and self-remonstration: poetry must, in F.H. Bradley’s persuasive formulation, get within the judgment the condition of … More
Category: 19th Century
221. (John Keats)
This post is the first in a series of evolving sketches on “decorum” in poetry; it leads into the next … More
218. (William Wordsworth)
Perverse as it is to redefine words against conventional meanings, it is nonetheless possible to loosen from conventional meanings an … More
202. (William Wordsworth)
Unlike Samson, whose strength returns with his hair and whose blindness, though indignity and infirmity, is not absolute impotence, Wordsworth’s … More
139. (Matthew Arnold)
Showing, earlier this week, some poems I’d written to a critic I admire and trust, I received back some critical … More
125. (Christina G. Rossetti)
Patience is the activity and end of Christina G. Rossetti’s poetry: patience for the time of God, for death, for … More
107. (Algernon Charles Swinburne)
Though Wilde mocked his pronouncements of sexual deviance, Swinburne quarried queer desire for a reinvention of the metaphysical tradition. Even … More
77. (R.H. Hutton)
One of the chief differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century voices of critical prose is that the former wrote for the … More
73. (John Keats)
The preference for the Keats of the letters to the Keats of the poems is more than the outcome of … More
59. (William Wordsworth)
Late in his life, in a letter to an inquiring William Rowan Hamilton, Wordsworth stressed the “innumerable minutiae” upon which … More
