Sentimental Poetry Research Articles

Romantic Poetry: The Possibilities for Improvisation

Previous articleNext article No AccessRomantic Poetry: The Possibilities for ImprovisationJeffrey C. RobinsonJeffrey C. Robinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 38, Number 3Summer 2007The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Meeting, 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045130 Views: 9Total views on this site © 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Secrets and Lies: Gossip and Art's Histories

Half the pleasure of reading Henry Adams's biography Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist lies in absorbing the weird but juicy bits of information that make for fun gossip. The Philadelphia artist dressed like a slob, drank a quart of milk a day, and threatened people occasionally with his revolver. His mother gave him an intestinal purge to cure him of outbursts of sentimental poetry in grammar school. He preferred sitting on the floor to sitting in a chair, and walked around the house in his underwear, even in the presence of company. Other information expands on the rumors and scandals that shaped the artist's career, and is more weighty and difficult to absorb. As we look at the development of Eakins's biography, and explore how generations of scholars have revised gossip on the artist, we learn at least as much about the practice of American art history about its needs and anxieties as we do about Eakins himself. Gossip the stories we tell and how they circulate often tells us more about the groups of people who produce it than it does about the subjects of the gossip itself. This insight is at the heart of the story that Gavin Butt tells in his study of discourse on sexuality and the artist, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963. This book tracks major shifts in the disciplinary narratives about the artist as a social type, via his reading of the gossip about New York artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Larry Rivers gossip that (as is the case with Eakins) invariably centers on the artists' sexuality. Pulling together the full range of available material on Eakins (including stories suppressed but preserved in the papers of Lloyd Goodrich, one of the

Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family, and Romantic Love Collected by America's Third President (review)

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family, and Romantic Love Collected by America's Third President Colin Wells (bio) Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family, and Romantic Love Collected by America's Third President. EDITED BY Jonathan Gross. Steerforth Press, 2006. 570 pp. From 1801 to 1808, while Thomas Jefferson was serving as president of the United States, he was also spending some of his leisure hours on the popular nineteenth-century activity of "scrapbooking"—cutting out his favorite newspaper articles and poems and pasting them onto the backs of old letters to create a sort of personal literary anthology. Comprising two volumes of prose and two of verse, Jefferson's scrapbooks remained, as it were, hidden in plain sight for nearly two hundred years. Few historians or literary scholars even knew of their existence, and those who did were uncertain as to whether the books had been compiled by Jefferson himself or by one of his granddaughters. Only in recent years has the mystery been solved—the scrapbooks are indeed the work of Jefferson—and now, Jonathan Gross has made the verse portion of the scrapbooks available to modern readers in this fascinating and valuable collection. In all, Jefferson's notebooks contain some 884 poems, roughly divided into one volume of political verse and one devoted to moral and sentimental poetry. Of these, Gross has selected approximately 240 poems and recategorized them into three parts, "Poems of Nation," "Poems of Family," and "Poems of Romantic Love." The first section, "Poems of Nation," constitutes something of a commentary in verse on Jefferson's presidency and his political philosophy. Beginning with "Jefferson and Liberty," an anonymous campaign song from 1800 (composed as a reply to Robert Treat Paine's "Adams and Liberty"), the poems follow a rough chronology through Jefferson's two terms in office, from campaign and inauguration songs to poems on the Lewis and Clarke expedition and the embargo. Not surprisingly, most of the poems represent a decidedly pro-Jeffersonian bent (though there are several contrary examples, including a few elegies on the death of Alexander Hamilton). There are songs in commemoration of the Fourth of July and Democratic-Republican gatherings—both implicit tributes to Jefferson—and more than a few satires against his Federalist opponents. Scholars familiar [End Page 626] with the larger body of poetry of the Early Republic will be fascinated to notice which poems Jefferson chose to include and which poems he didn't: Joel Barlow's celebration of the Lewis and Clark expedition is in, while John Quincy Adams's satiric retort to Barlow, which calls into question the ideology of westward expansion, is not. And though in reality, poems critical of the embargo far outnumbered those in favor, in Jefferson's collection the reverse is true. Indeed, the juxtaposition of poems on the embargo—usually viewed as the great failure of Jefferson's presidency—demand to be read as an exercise in ideological justification: in one place, a single anti-embargo song is succeeded by two parodic responses to that song and followed, in turn, by several additional defenses of the embargo, as if Jefferson used the scrapbook to dramatize the "victory" of his own position over those of his critics. Jefferson scholars will undoubtedly discover other such examples of literary-political ventriloquism in this collection. If the "Poems of Nation" reveal Jefferson the political apologist, the "Poems of Family" bring to light the widow, father, and grandfather, who sought, in his absence from home and family, to use poetry as a means of cultivating his relationship with his grandchildren. As Gross points out in the introduction to this section, Jefferson sent clippings of verse to his granddaughters and encouraged them to assemble scrapbooks of their own. He also seems to have considered his own scrapbook not merely a personal collection but as something to be passed on to his heirs, and thus to communicate to them a set of values regarding love, marriage, and family. Unlike his political views, which sometimes veered toward the radical, Jefferson's domestic values tend to reflect the common verities of eighteenth-century literature and life: there are poems praising moderation and...

Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (review)

After Napoleon: Political in Late Works. By Stephen Rumph. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [ix, 295 p. ISBN 0-520-23855-9. $45.] Index. Stephen Rumph's After Napoleon: Political in Late Works tackles vitally important topic: relation of music to its political context. The pieces that come under consideration include Third and Ninth Symphonies and Fidelia, as well as Egmont music, number of sonatas and quartets, some of Beethoven's patriotic songs and marches, and particularly his Battle 1813, Wellingtons Sieg. As author rightly states in his introduction, a political study of can scarcely be regarded as curiosity for interdisciplinary studies: it belongs squarely within musical criticism, alongside biography, sketch studies, and formal analysis (p. 1). Rumph frames his argument in relation to movement known as politische Romantik (political Romanticism) led by such figures as Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Heinrich von Kleist. He emphasizes their grievances against French cultural hegemony and their virulent reaction to all things French and enlightened. This of political Romanticism, he claims, was no passing fad for Beethoven but exercised profound and enduring influence on his later (p. 5). There is scant documentation of Beethoven's connection to these writers, and although Rumph acknowledges that his study is speculative, he aims to convey 'new way of seeing' . . . [that] incarnates ideological in specifically musical structures (p. 8). In opening chapters of Rumph impressively draws upon aesthetic writings of Friedrich Schiller, writer whom admired. Schiller's notion of artistic activity as Spieltrieb (play drive) and his famous distinction between naive and sentimental poetry are explored. Emanuel Kant's theory of sublime serves as context for thoughtful comments on Beethoven's treatment of das Erhabene in his song Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur, Gettert Songs, op. 48. Another influential writer who receives attention here is E. T. A. Hoffmann. Rumph is particularly interested in Hoffmann's famous critique of Fifth Symphony 1810, in which Beethoven's music is regarded as revealing unknown kingdom, that has nothing in common with outer sensory world (p. 9). Rumph's strategy is to invert Hoffmann's view. He seeks to show that Beethoven's late works represent kingdom that is very much of this world, one that actually reflects reactionary turn in politics of post-Napoleonic Europe. Such an argument has originality, and goes against grain of much scholarship. Rumph admits that the young embraced an ideological view diametrically opposed to ethos of political Romanticism (p. 35). Nonetheless, he sees decisive shift in Beethoven's attitude beginning in 1809, when Napoleon's armies besieged and occupied Vienna. Rumph finds that Beethoven's letters from 1809 to 1813 trace an unbroken arc of resentment, in which pins full blame for his economic vicissitudes on war with France (p. 96). Against this historical background, Rumph sets forth main point of [his] entire book, namely that the same ideology that shaped Beethoven's late style helped create Restoration (pp. 106-07). A key work to address in this context is surely Beethoven's only opera, Fidelia. Unfortunately, Rumph does not investigate thoroughly some aspects of opera that do not conform to his thesis. Fidelia is closely bound up with French models and Enlightenment ideals, and its extensive final revision took place in 1814, several years after Rumph sees as having renounced these principles. While he acknowledges that Leonore wears pants in this opera of conjugal love (p. 164), he does not recognize her full importance as symbol of liberty, which was enhanced unforgettably in section added to Florestan's aria in revision (a passage influenced in turn by Egmont's vision of Clarchen in Egmont music, 1810). …

Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.

Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.

Phillis Wheatley and the Sentimental Tradition

This essay describes critics’ relations to sentimentality, and then situates Phillis Wheatley’s poetry within it. Carefully distinguishing between Enlightenment poetry of sensibility and nineteenth-century sentimental poetry allows us to recognize Wheatley as among the first innovators of sentimentality, and it is precisely the politics of “race” which promotes such an innovation. Wheatley’s poetry presents us with a manifesto of sentimentality. She discovered the advantages, in the task of overcoming poetical oppression, of constructing a sentimental poetry that is genuinely intersubjective rather than subjective. What this examination of Wheatley’s work shows us is that the Romantic, expressivist aesthetic, allegedly so spontaneous, can be seen as in fact much more manipulative – at least politically – than Wheatley’s innovative, sentimentalist form.

“The soul that dreams it shares the power it feels so well”: The Politics of Sympathy in the Abolitionist Verse of Williams and Yearsley

Identifying abolitionist poetry as an important site for investigating rhetorical transformations and innovations in late eighteenth century women’s poetry, this essay shows how poetic language generates sympathy. In reading women’s poetry in general, and abolitionist poetry in particular, we too often presume that they worked under the assumption that all readers would identify directly with representations of suffering. While William Cowper, writing before Helen Maria Williams and Ann Yearsley, opens up the problematic that all forms of sympathy might be mere narcissistic self-indulgence, Yearsley and Williams provide a model for and effectively limit such reflexive sympathy. For them, the process of sympathizing with an Other begins with the act of taking him or her into one’s own imaginative “domos.” But by actively embracing this narcissistic process, Williams and Yearsley are able to regulate such domestications of the slave’s pain. Williams controlswhoseidentities merge, ensuring that the reader identifies with reformer rather than slaver. In contrast, Yearsley encourages wider-ranging imaginative acts of identification – one can identify with the “crafty merchant” of her “Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade” – but ensures through various poetic devices that such an act will reveal the disjunction between family and capital. By drawing out various theories of the working of sentiment, this essay makes visible sentimental poetry’s theoretical power: slavery poems by Williams and Yearsley operate as sophisticated theories of sympathetic identification.

The Voice of toil: nineteenth-century British writings about work

One of the most recurrent and controversial subjects of nineteenth-century discourse was work. Many thinkers associated work with honest pursuit of doing good, not the curse accompanying exile from Eden but rather great gift of God. Sincerely undertaken work comprised a mission entailing a commitment to serve others and promote a better future for all. Satisfaction with what work could do for individuals had its counterbalance in the anger and dismay expressed at the conditions of those whom Robert Owen, in 1817, first called the working class. What working-class people confronted both at the labor site and at their lodgings was construed as oppressive, and the misery of their lives became the subject of sentimental poetry, government report, popular fiction, and journalistic expose. Perhaps as heated as the discussion about conditions of lower-class workers was the conversation about separate spheres of work for men and women. This conversation, too, found its way into the literature and public discourse of the day. In The Voice of Toil, the editors have collected the central writings from a pivotal place and time, including poems, stories, essays, and a play that reflect four prominent ways in which the subject of work was addressed: Work as Mission, Work as Opportunity, Work as Oppression, and (Separate) Spheres of Work. The resulting anthology offers a provocative text for students of nineteenth-century British literature and history and a valuable resource for scholars. The text includes readings from John Wesley, William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, William Morris, Joanna Baillie, Friedrich Engels, Matthew Arnold, Angela Burdett-Coutts, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bernard Shaw and many others.

The masochistic pleasures of sentimental literature

For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World , Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature exemplifies new trends in "Third Wave" feminist scholarship, presenting cultural and historical research informed by clear, lucid discussions of psychoanalytic and literary theory. It demonstrates that contemporary theories of masochism--including those of Deleuze, Bataille, Kristeva, Benjamin, Bersani, Noyes, Mansfield--are more relevant and comprehensible when considered in relation to sentimental literature.

Robert Frost and feminine literary tradition

In spite of Robert Frost's continuing popularity with the public, the poet remains an outsider in the academy, where more difficult and innovative poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are presented as the great American modernists. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition considers the reason for this disparity, exploring the relationship among notions of popularity, masculinity, and greatness. Karen Kilcup reveals Frost's subtle links with earlier feminine traditions like sentimental poetry and New England regionalist fiction, traditions fostered by such well-known women precursors and contemporaries as Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She argues that Frost altered and finally obscured these feminine voices and values that informed his earlier published work and that to appreciate his achievement fully, we need to recover and acknowledge the power of his affective, emotional voice in counterpoint and collaboration with his more familiar ironic and humorous tones.

"That Tritest/Brightest Truth": Emily Dickinson's Anti-Sentimentality

While the cultural importance of sentimental fiction has been well documented by critics such as Jane Tompkins and Claudia Tate, the nature and function of sentimental poetry has remained largely unexplored. This essay offers a corrective to this critical tendency by reading major poems by Emily Dickinson in terms of the contemporary sentimental fictions of death and immortality to which they are indebted. Against those critics who have emphasized Dickinson's embrace of sentimentality's domestication of death, the essay argues that her poems contest and even negate the fictions of immortality made available by popular authors such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Ik Marvel. Dickinson's poems employ certain distinctive generic conventions of sentimentality's conduct of death-the passage from life to immortality, the posthumous reunion, the equation of heaven and home. But where sentimental fictions employ familiar scenes of earth and home to represent the less-familiar prospect of heaven and immortality, Dickinson's poems remove hometown places and persons from heaven's scene; where sentimental fictions domesticate death, her poems detach and strip it bare. The characteristic features of her poetry-scenelessness and temporal transcendence-are thus the mark neither of Dickinson's incipient modernism nor of the lyric voice's isolation from society or history, but rather of Dickinson's deliberate departure from a historically specific mode of representing immortality.

Born Modest

Born Modest by Loyal Jones 82 One thing I've noticed about growing up in the mountains is that we ve had such a load of modesty laid on us, we can't even stick to the truth, especially if it casts us in a positive light. We don't ever feel right admitting to anything that might make us look proud of doing something right or being a nice person. I grew up so far back the sun set between our house and the road. We were surely a modest people, but as my father said, we had a whole lot to be modest about. My uncle said that the history of our family could be written on the flyleaf of a pumpkin seed. I've thought about that, and I don't know. It seems to me that we all have about the same amount of history, except that some of us lost it along the way, like pocket knives, tie clips, and that sentimental poetry book Aunt Chloe sent us one Christmas. I remember helping this friend from New England move, and I remarked about a bed that had seemed to be around for a good many years. "Yes," he said. "We come from a long line of people." "Most of us do," I said. That is true, whether or not we can name all of our forebears who walked the earth, toiled, kicked over the traces now and again, dreamed, mourned for something or someone and reluctantly shuffled off this coil. They were probably as serious about what they were up to as we are, were disappointed in themselves at times, or elated when they overshot their own mark. They humped their loads along, being a part of it all, whether or not they are now recalled. The writer of Ecclesiasticus put it best, "some there be, which have no memorial . . . and are become as though they had not been born . . ." but he also said, "Their seed ständeth fast and their children for their sakes. Their seeds shall remain forever ..." The writer spoke ironically when he added, "Let us now praise famous men." So we should praise those who are unremembered. I like to try to imagine those who went before me, the Joneses and Morgans and Holdens and Bâties and Bostons and Weathermans, now forgotten, and even before them, those with single common names before surnames were invented. No one in my family knows where any of our forbears landed in this country or where in Wales, Scotland, England, or Germany they lived before they ventured here. Would we recognize them as kindred? Would we like them? How much of what we are did they send down to us in genes and traditions? Plenty, I suspect. One thing they sent down is a heavy load of Calvinism. It is responsible for most of our humility and modesty and has told us more than we wanted to know about human frailty. I remember this fellow who had a son go to the Eenitentiarv, and he wrote his father, "In ere, Daddy, it's just like it is out there. Us Baptists is in the lead." The men's group at the church gave one of my uncles an award for humility, but they took it away when they heard him bragging about it. We always shied away from praise, as if we thought that if we admitted we were good at something, we'd forget how to do it, or the preacher would make a call on us. So, everybody always had some excuse to cover up any talent he had. A neighbor was a good musician, but he had to protest for a while before it seemed right to play. He'd complain about his banjo not staying in tune or how he'd had an old cold and didn't have any more voice than a bullfrog. This sort of thing went on even if you had just demonstrated that you were good at what it is that you do. If somebody made a fine speech at the Farmer's Federation picnic and was complimented for it, he'd say, "Well, now...

German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe

Acknowledgements Note on the translations Introduction 1. Winckelmann: Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks 2. Lessing: Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry, Letter to Nicolai, 26 May 1769 3. Hamman: Aesthetica in nuce 4. Herder: Extract from a correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples 5. Schiller: On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 6. Goethe: Winckelmann Notes Bibliography Index.

Sintezės tendencija F. Šilerio estetikoje

Straipsnyje analizuojama poezijos samprata ir skirtingų poezijos tipų sintezės tendencija F. Schillerio estetikoje. Pasak F. Schillerio, poetas – tai laisvas, natūralus ir drąsus, atsidavęs pasaulio pilnybei kūrėjas, vaizduodamas objektą, poetas jį kartu vertina ir apmąsto. F. Schilleris skyrė naiviuosius (antikos) ir sentimentaliuosius (naujųjų amžių) poetus. Naivieji poetai, apsiriboję realybe, tampa priklausomi nuo medžiagos, kuri gali labai neigiamai, žalingai juos paveikti. Sentimentalieji poetai džiaugsmingai, neribotai linksminasi idėjų pasaulyje, tobulindami visa, kas jiems atrodo perdirbama. F. Schilleris pabrėžia, jog šių dviejų tipų sintezė veda į tobulumą, harmonijos poeto užgimimą, protingą žmogiškosios būties supratimą. Jis šiais poetiniais tipais išreiškia žmogaus charakterio skirtingus polius – realistinį ir idealistinį. Laiškuose F. Schilleris teigė, kad savo poetine kūryba jis siekia įrodyti realizmo ir idealizmo sujungimo galimybę ir kalba apie savo naująjį kelią, kurį vadina realistiniu. Šis kelias tebuvo sintezės, priešingumų sutaikymo kelias. Pabrėžiama, kad F. Schilleris pradėjo idėjų dramą, kurioje siužetas, charakteriai ir dialogas tėra priemonės idėjoms reikšti.

The Robust Navvy: The Railway Construction Worker in Northern New South Wales, 1854-1894

The literature on the railway navvy is not extensive. Overseas works include Thomas Brassey's On Work and Wages, 1873; Edmund W. Bradwin's The Bunkhouse Man, 1928, about navvies in Canada; and Terry Coleman's popular British work, The Railway Navvies, 1965. Four Australian books focus on the lives of Australian railway builders: Donald MacLean's fictionalised biography John Scarlett, Ganger, 1912; Lillian M. Pyke's children's book Camp Kiddies, c. 1920?; Jack Booth's fictionalised biography Vnly the Tracks Remain, 1972; and Patsy Adam Smith's documentary The Desert Railway, 1974. In addition, N. G. Butlin has contributed to the literature: chapter 5 of his Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1964, assesses the impact of late nineteenth century Australian railway construction on capital and labour markets. Thus, secondary sources tell us little about the men who built Australia's railways. Nevertheless, we can piece together something of their lives from old country newspapers, parish registers, government archives on unemployment, migration statistics, bits of sentimental poetry and rebellious folklore, the memories of old timers, and from the derelict remains of the navvies' camps. This article, based on such sources, is about the life and work of the navvies who built the Great Northern Railway and the Tweed-Lismore Railway in northern New South Wales.