The perversity of poetry
Subtitle: romantic ideology and the popular male poet of genius
By: Dino Franco Felluga.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Albany
Language: eng
Number of pages: 208
Subjects: Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824 -- Appreciation.; Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771-1832 -- Poetic works.; Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771-1832 -- Appreciation.; English poetry -- Male authors -- History and criticism.; Popular literature -- Great Britain -- History and criticism.; English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.); Romanticism -- Great Britain.; Masculinity in literature.; Genius in literature.; Men in literature.
Description: "In The Perversity of Poetry, Dino Franco Felluga explores the cultural background of poetry's marginalization by examining nineteenth-century reactions to Romantic poetry and ideology. Focusing on the work of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, as well as periodical reviews, student manuals, and contemporary medical journals, the book details the periods's two contending (and equally outrageous) claims regarding poetry. Scott's poetry, on the one hand, was continually represented as a panacea for a modern world overtaken by new principles of utilitarianism, capitalism, industrialism, and democracy. Byron's by contrast, was represented either as a cancer in the heart of the social order or as a contagious pandemic leading to various pathological symptoms. The book concludes with a coda on Alfred Lord Tennyson, which illustrates how the Victorian reception of Scott and Byron affected the most popular poetic genius of midcentury. Ultimately, The Perversity of Poetry uncovers how the shift to a rhetoric of health allowed critics to oppose what they perceived as a potent and potentially dangerous influence on the age, the very thing that would over the course of the century be marginalized into such obscurity: poetry, thanks to its perverse insistence on making something happen."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-198) and index.