Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society, and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas HardyThese essays focus primarily on the theme of selfhood and subjective experience in the poetry of the British Romantic period, and in the later poetry and novels that were its legacy. There are chapters on Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hardy and George Eliot - writers who, though often having a strong interest in public affairs, all turned inwards to make trial of imagination and the individual life as sources of order and value against a background of cultural unsettlement. The book moves from the emergence of post-Enlightenment psychological man to the proto-modernist preoccupation with the self as construct in Byron and Hardy. |
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Page 128
... Poet's journeyings and death is , as we shall see , very much concerned with the possibilities and the problems of that position . Already , however , the invocation itself has been fraught with a sense of overarching limitation : even ...
... Poet's journeyings and death is , as we shall see , very much concerned with the possibilities and the problems of that position . Already , however , the invocation itself has been fraught with a sense of overarching limitation : even ...
Page 132
... Poet's ' lovely dream ' becomes a consuming passion , not only urging him blindly onwards but gradually destroying the life that ' shone / As in a furnace burning secretly from his dark eyes alone ' ( ll . 252-54 ) . Entrapment and ...
... Poet's ' lovely dream ' becomes a consuming passion , not only urging him blindly onwards but gradually destroying the life that ' shone / As in a furnace burning secretly from his dark eyes alone ' ( ll . 252-54 ) . Entrapment and ...
Page 133
... Poet cried aloud , ' I have beheld The path of thy departure . Sleep and death Shall not divide us long ! ' ( 11. 366-69 ) In Michael O'Neill's view this exemplifies ' the poem's element of immaturity ... because the lines have a ...
... Poet cried aloud , ' I have beheld The path of thy departure . Sleep and death Shall not divide us long ! ' ( 11. 366-69 ) In Michael O'Neill's view this exemplifies ' the poem's element of immaturity ... because the lines have a ...
Contents
William Cowper and the Condition of England | 19 |
Cowpers The Castaway | 33 |
Wordsworth Bunyan and the Puritan Mind | 69 |
Copyright | |
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Adonais Alastor Apollo Arabella beauty becomes Bunyan Byron Canto Castaway Chapter Childe Harold Christminster Coleridge's consciousness course Cowper creative Critical dark death desire despair destiny divine Donald Davie drama dream edition Elegy emotional Endymion English Essays eternal event example existence experience expression faith favour feeling Gray's Hardy Hardy's heart hope human hymns Hyperion idea ideal imagination interpretation John Keats Jude Jude the Obscure Jude's Julian and Maddalo Keats Keats's Letters and Prose living London Lonsdale Lyrical Lyrical Ballads maniac mariner Mary Shelley McGann meaning meditation mind narrative nature Nature's Olney hymns perception Pilgrim's Progress poem poet poet's poetic poetry political Prelude present psychodrama psychological Puritan Queen Mab reader reading reference Romantic sense Shelley Shelley's soul spirit stanza suffering thee theme things Thomas Gray thou thought Tintern Abbey transcendence truth universe verse vision William Cowper words Wordsworth