Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRomanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Michael Gamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+307.Yohei IgarashiYohei IgarashiUniversity of Connecticut Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMany “re-”prefixed words are associated with the figure of the Romantic poet (rebel, reactionary, revolutionary), and the period’s poetry brings to mind all manner of repetitions with a difference (revisiting, recalling, apparent tautology), but we have not really thought about William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Robert Southey, and company as engaged in marketing do-overs like “rebranding” (8), “repackaging” (2), and “reselling” (56). Yet Michael Gamer’s engaging, expert new study, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry, reveals that the rebundling and reselling of already published poems was as important to Romantic poets as it was to the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era book trade. Readers encounter the most “businesslike” (73) side of Smith, and the actuarial underwriting that underwrote Southey’s ideas about posthumous fame. But the book is not out to expose authorial interestedness so much as to give a “worldly (and sympathetic) depiction of writers as keenly aware of the connections between cultural and commercial activity” (9), and Gamer’s detailed portraits of poets’ financial situations, and the book’s tone throughout, maintain this “sympathetic” stance.Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry is concerned with the “re-collection”: “the authorized, transformational reprinting of works that have appeared earlier in some other form” (2). The book is not about the kind of poetry collection that comes first to mind (a volume made up of mostly unpublished content), although it is interested in taking the poetic volume or volumes as a unit of analysis, in this way like Neil Fraistat’s The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry (1985). Gamer’s original topic is rather the collection mostly featuring already published work, sometimes with some new ones thrown in: anthologies, collected or selected works, and subsequent editions. Some of these types of collections have been studied, some (e.g., the anthology) more than others (e.g., the later edition). One of Gamer’s bold premises is that such varieties of “republication and authorized reprinting” (120) can be grouped and studied together under a single bibliographic-generic category. The third and fifth editions of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1786, 1789), an anthology of Della Cruscan verse, the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth’s collected Poems (1815), The Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), and Southey’s retrospective Poetical Works (1837–38) are all re-collections. Probably most readers would not have thought to bring such volumes together, but Gamer’s book itself engages in re-collection, demonstrating the power of the playlist. One of the book’s motifs is that the “re-dressing” (8) and then reselling of poems is almost always motivated not by financial need alone, but by both need and the need to redress: redressing critics, lukewarm or nasty reviews, one’s own reputation and prospects of canonicity, the collection’s perceived flaws the first time around, or Coleridge.According to Gamer’s historical argument, the re-collection takes on new significance after the rise of “publisher’s canons” (19). These anthologies gathered, reprinted, and made widely accessible certain vernacular authors and their works—John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (1777–82), Samuel Johnson’s Works of the English Poets (1779–81), Robert Anderson’s Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (1792–95), for example—and they were very familiar to Romantic-era readers. William St. Clair’s account in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004) of the changing intellectual property regime and the emergence of what he calls the “old canon” (122–39) is quite similar, but the difference in Gamer’s book is that it wants to know how such anthologies influenced Romantic poets when it came time for them to re-collect their own poems, and other related cases. The book’s first chapter is masterful. Gamer demonstrates how “publisher’s canons,” namely, Johnson’s Works of the English Poets, as well as the tradition of the “self-collection” (19) from Petrarch and Tasso through Pope, shaped Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems, with its baffling classifications and canonical pretensions.Sonnet cycles become “recycle[d]” (57) sonnets in chapter 2, as Gamer looks at how Charlotte Smith made the most of the popularity of Elegiac Sonnets by publishing successive editions of it. From the ten editions Elegiac Sonnets went through, Gamer focuses on the third edition of 1786 (when the number of poems nearly doubled from the prior editions, and when the collection first achieves “formal coherence” [72]) and the deluxe fifth edition of 1789, which Smith sold by subscription. Chapter 4 takes up the Lyrical Ballads 1798 versus 1800 problem. (This chapter expands on the introductory essay and maps included in Gamer and Dahlia Porter’s 2008 edition of Lyrical Ballads; the chapter is not only about a transformed version, then, it is itself one.) Gamer’s comparison of the two editions of Lyrical Ballads around the question of “proprietary control” (14)—literary propriety, intellectual and landed property, “Michael”—furthers a line of inquiry pursued also by Susan Eilenberg’s Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (1992), for example, and Gamer makes striking contributions. For example, Wordsworth, upon detecting “specific patterns of praise and blame” (126) in the initial reviews, made certain modifications in the poems he wrote for the 1800 edition’s second volume. One learns that these poems feature significantly longer line lengths, corresponding with a shift from “shorter lyrics to longer, more discursive forms” (126), and the poems geographically cluster more narrowly within the Lake District. Chapter 5 culminates in a look at Southey’s retrospective self-fashioning in his Poetical Works. His ambivalence about the laureateship—the position was held in low esteem as royal mouthpiece, but its modest salary nevertheless allowed him to take out a good life insurance policy—is reflected in his Works, which downplay the laureateship; Southey relegates what official laureate verse he wrote to the volumes containing “Juvenile and Minor Poems,” and omitted his Poet Laureate title from the title pages of his collection. This chapter’s concern with life insurance reminds one of other scholarship like Charlotte Mitchell and Charles Mitchell’s “Wordsworth and the Old Men” (Journal of Legal History 25 [2004]: 31–52), which is on Wordsworth’s participation in shady investment schemes, and points to an understudied, personal-finance aspect of Romanticism that we might like to know more about.Two chapters are slightly different from the rest because they are mainly about poetic volumes put together by editors other than the poet(s). One of them takes a novel approach to the revaluation of the Della Cruscan poets: Gamer picks up on the special abuse reserved for the consummate anthologizer-publisher, John Bell, in William Gifford’s The Baviad (1791), a poem that satirized and set the low reputation of the Della Cruscans. This coterie’s poetry and politics became especially noxious to Gifford when their undeserving verse was collected in anthologies like Bell’s British Album (1790), where “the Della Cruscans appeared in high cultural packaging” (117) hardly different from the bibliographic features of Bell’s old canon anthologies. And the final chapter, on The Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, reveals that Mary Shelley drew on the reception of Hunt’s short-lived periodical, the Liberal (1822–23), the symbolism attached to Percy’s “unconsumable” heart (quoted, 198), and “Adonais” as she constituted and ordered the volume—an essential or selected Shelley designed to portray a less controversial Shelley who “could write without shocking any one” (quoted, 219–20). If one had to niggle—speaking of a “marketing decision” (74)—it would be that the word, “re-collection,” the book’s true subject and consistent source of insight, is not in the title, whereas “self-canonization” is, when certain chapters are about allo- rather than auto-anthologization, and canon-related fates seem to lie in many others’ hands and on other factors besides the poet’s wish for immortality through collection. Then again, “self-canonization” admittedly works better as a keyword.Overall, Gamer’s book is expertly and persuasively argued. Chapters move adroitly between poets’ financial circumstances, publication and reception history, copyright matters, analyses of a collection’s bibliographic form, and readings of exemplary poems. The book joins other works of economic criticism that have filled in our understanding of “the connections between cultural and commercial activity” in this period, for example, Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008) or Lee Erickson’s The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (1996). Gamer’s book is uniquely concerned, however, with rebundling, and present-day readers will find much that is suggestive about our own era of content unbundling and cultural recycling. Another notable feature of this book is its methodological reflexiveness about “the challenges of interpreting poetic collections … about entities possessing so many moving parts” (68), and Gamer responds with statistics, tables, and maps that help readers see how collections evolve; it is easy to imagine these visual aids becoming handy resources to puzzle over in future scholarship and the classroom alike. Finally, there are many memorable stretches: on the Romantic-era box set, boxes specially made to house those “publisher’s canons” and designed to look like folios; the semantics of the subscription list; tense correspondence between Southey and his far more successful frenemy, Walter Scott (who turned down the laureateship before it went to Southey); details about Southey’s daily writing routine. Gamer’s excellent book succeeds in getting readers thinking about the lifetimes of hustle involved in posthumous fame and Romantic poetry’s bibliographic version of the greatest hits album or box set. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry reveals that the iterative compilation is not merely derivative and that curating for a shot at immortality is literary art as much as business. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 1August 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697675HistoryPublished online March 23, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.