Denise Gigante
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300136852
- eISBN:
- 9780300155587
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300136852.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
What makes something alive? Or, more to the point, what is life? The question is as old as the ages and has not been (and may never be) resolved. Life springs from life, and liveliness motivates ...
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What makes something alive? Or, more to the point, what is life? The question is as old as the ages and has not been (and may never be) resolved. Life springs from life, and liveliness motivates matter to act the way it does. Yet vitality in its very unpredictability often appears as a threat. This book explores how major writers of the Romantic period strove to produce living forms of art on an analogy with biological form, often finding themselves face to face with a power known as monstrous. The poets Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats were all immersed in a culture obsessed with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation, and they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of “life.” This book offers a way to read ostensibly difficult poetry and reflects on the natural-philosophical idea of organic form and the discipline of literary studies.Less
What makes something alive? Or, more to the point, what is life? The question is as old as the ages and has not been (and may never be) resolved. Life springs from life, and liveliness motivates matter to act the way it does. Yet vitality in its very unpredictability often appears as a threat. This book explores how major writers of the Romantic period strove to produce living forms of art on an analogy with biological form, often finding themselves face to face with a power known as monstrous. The poets Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats were all immersed in a culture obsessed with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation, and they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of “life.” This book offers a way to read ostensibly difficult poetry and reflects on the natural-philosophical idea of organic form and the discipline of literary studies.
Denise Gigante
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300136852
- eISBN:
- 9780300155587
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300136852.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter examines the principle of monstrosity in John Keats' poem Lamia. It suggests that this poem represents a central instance of Romantic monstrosity and discusses John Lempriere's A ...
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This chapter examines the principle of monstrosity in John Keats' poem Lamia. It suggests that this poem represents a central instance of Romantic monstrosity and discusses John Lempriere's A Classical Dictionary which is usually assumed to be the source text for Lamia. It also contends that the theory of self-propagating vital power that biologists were pursuing through the material forms of nature's liveliness found aesthetic expression in Keats whose vitalist aesthetic consists in a symbolic undoing of classic poetic forms.Less
This chapter examines the principle of monstrosity in John Keats' poem Lamia. It suggests that this poem represents a central instance of Romantic monstrosity and discusses John Lempriere's A Classical Dictionary which is usually assumed to be the source text for Lamia. It also contends that the theory of self-propagating vital power that biologists were pursuing through the material forms of nature's liveliness found aesthetic expression in Keats whose vitalist aesthetic consists in a symbolic undoing of classic poetic forms.
