On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word by Angela Leighton

Abstract

840 Reviews Macfarlane explains, creatio posits art as 'an addition towhat exists', inventio as 'an edition of it' (p. I), and he reads this split in thewriting of several finde siecle authors as evidence of awider social debate about origins and originality.Macfarlane begins with Edward Young (I 759) and theRomantic poets who answered his call fora genius which 'grows' and 'isnotmade' (p. i8).Macfarlane then traces a swing away from this perception firstin theworks ofBrowning, whose poetry envisions God as theonly au tonomous creator.He argues that a growing sense of the 'increased self-consciousness about the impossibility of originality' (p. I55) was then articulated in turn by a new generation ofwriters who made no bones about the intertextual, reclaimed nature of their texts.Macfarlane's readings of Emerson andWilliam Morris demonstrate their interest in 'choral' works of literature (p. 74) while his discussion ofDickens aligns his language of 'composition and decomposition' (p. 52) to thenovelist's sense of debt to literaryhistory and toVictorian concerns about waste disposal and hy giene. Likewise, George Eliot's misquotations of numerous authors inher epigraphs and notebooks are framed rightly byMacfarlane as creative misreading, while the scrapbooks of Charles Reade, the aphorisms ofOscar Wilde, and the palimpsests of Lionel Johnson's poetry are all persuasively revealed as acts of creative appropriation. Surely, then, Macfarlane's work itselfappropriates Bloomian discourse even ifitdoes so to critique and move beyond it,a la inventio.A finalnote: as this review illustrates, Macfarlane's studymakes ample use of italicized French and Latin phrases. Linguis tically, this jars as thework deals solelywith textswritten inEnglish; stylistically it is simply distracting. At the end of his study, Macfarlane citesWalter Raleigh. 'In the manner of language,' Raleigh wrote, 'we lead a parasitical existence and are always quoting.' As Macfarlane's work exemplifies through its conscious and unconscious debts to the past, this is as truenow as iteverwas in thefinde siecle. KINGSTON UNIVERSITY MEG JENSEN On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and theLegacy of a Word. By ANGELA LEIGHTON. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. viii+288 pp. ?30. ISBN 978-o-ig 929o60-4. Good form requires dexterity as well as discipline, and one of themany strengths of Angela Leighton's absorbing study is theway inwhich hermeditations on form are not allowed toharden into a formula. Leighton's subject is theway in which form (the word, theconcept, thepractice) refuses tosit still, and her book traces the implications of this restlessness forour understanding ofnineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and aesthetics. Yes, formmight be considered 'an abstraction frommatter', but it is also 'subtly inflected towardsmatter [. . .] a noun lying inwait for itsobject' (p. I). Defences of an art forart's sake from theRomantics onward sometimes invoke form in theguise of a distinctly chilly formalism, yet alongside such abstract leanings one can often discern an appetite forembodiment, a yearning forfleshand blood. As Leighton so deftly and convincingly shows us, formcan be at once a retreat and a stimulus. We might conceive well-wrought urns, then, as both empty and full of portent. Keats's decision towrite an ode on an urn rather than a vase is significant: 'AGreek Vase is a self-contained artefact; a Grecian urn is an empty container. It therefore remembers a kind of use, a lost content [. . .]An urn does not naturally stand on its own. It belongs among the dead and its empty hold recalls them' (p. 4I). Such recall is also a resource; aestheticism is rarely 'pure' aestheticism, and themovement is haunted and energized by thisKeatsian precedent, one that 'brings into play the very ethical, sexual, economic questions itstaves off' (p. 45). The significance of this play frequently allows a study of form to shade into a discussion ofwhy literature MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 84I may matter tous: 'It isas play, even as theplaying of "lyres and flutes", that literature might have something to say. Such play is not a totally freeplay, but remains con nected with ethical and political values. But neither is itnormatively identical with those values, so thatone can be bedrocked in theother' (p. 36). Given the nature of her subject, it is fitting thatLeighton's style is playful yet obliquely purposive, and the book is arranged as a series...