Abstract
This essay argues that the spirit of Charlotte Dacre’s Romantic lyric might be seen as in flight from the rigid early eighteenth-century technical prosodies that seek to embody it. Prosody’s own flight from petrifaction at the hands of the early eighteenth century’s dominant model, Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1702), toward the formal liberty endorsed by late-century prosodists underwrites transformations in lyric poetry’s self-image as a spirit or specter. The gap between the eighteenth century’s pious Graveyard School ghosts and the darker spectrality of Romantics like Charlotte Dacre marks a movement away from material order toward late-century prosody’s ghostly materiality. The ghost that is merely a petrified “grizly spectre” in Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) becomes, in Dacre’s understudied poetry of the spectral lover, a liminal presence trembling on the poem’s “hazardous line” between both poetry and prosody and life and death.
Published Version
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