Pervious landscapes: Pope, Wordsworth, Cowper. The weather underground: Pope in "Ode on solitude" -- Bearing it away: "The solitary reaper" -- "What can it signify?": finding the subject in "On the Ice-Islands floating in the Germanic Ocean" -- Landscapes of loss: Duck, Goldsmith, Crabbe. "Lost, drown'd": the problem of the imagination in "The thresher's labour" -- Road to nowhere: the poetics of absence in "The deserted village" -- Lost cause: The village and the place of the manners tribute -- Vanishings: Thomson, Gray, Smith. "Conning nature's book": body, soul, self, and poetic vision in The seasons -- Vanishing point: Gray in the Eton ode -- "Bearing the cor'se to land": Beachy head.
Summary:
"This book discusses the intrusion, often inadvertent, of personal voice into the poetry of landscape in Britain, 1700-1807. It argues that strong conventions, such as those that inhere in topographical verse of the period, invite original poets to overstep those bounds while also shielding them from the repercussions of self-expression. Working under cover of convention in this manner and because for each of these poets place is tied in significant ways to personal history, poets of place may launch unexpected explorations into memory, personhood, and the workings of consciousness. The book supplements traditionally political readings of landscape poetry, turning to questions of self-articulation and self-expression in order to argue that the autobiographical impulse is a distinctive and innovative feature of much great eighteenth-century poetry of place. Among the poets under examination are Pope, Thomson, Duck, Gray, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cowper, Smith, and Wordsworth"-- Provided by publisher
Series:
Routledge studies in eighteenth-century literature
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.