Reframing Poetry: The Romantic Essay and the Prospects of Verse
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10509585.2013.785685
ISSN1740-4657
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoAbstract What happens to poetry when it is reframed within a work of prose? This paper analyzes William Hazlitt's prose style, with particular attention to moments in which he reframes poetry by extracting it from the patterns of rhyme and meter and placing it within the rhythms of his essays. In doing so, Hazlitt stylistically challenged the boundaries of genre; simultaneously, the content of his essays defined prose as a hybrid form, built through a process of mining other texts for quotations. This paper also makes an argument for the crucial role material culture played in Hazlitt's writing style. It demonstrates how Hazlitt's participation in friendship albums and commonplace books informed what he called a “familiar style” of writing. Ultimately, this paper sheds light on understudied manuscripts and analyzes their role in shaping the Romantic-essay form. Notes For a good discussion of Ancient and Renaissance uses of commonplaces and commonplace books, see Mary Crane's Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (1993) and Ann Moss's Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (1996). For more on Bacon, Montaigne and the commonplace-book tradition, see Ann Blair's Too Much to Know (2010). On Hazlitt's philosophical contributions see Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays collected by Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin, and Duncan Wu (2005). Hazlitt's stylistic innovations have been expertly discussed by Tom Paulin in The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998) and more recently, by Marcus Tomalin in Romanticism and Linguistic Theory: William Hazlitt, Language, and Literature (2009). Duncan Wu's recent biography William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (2008) has also brought additional attention to Hazlitt's writing. In his recent biography, Wu quotes a letter from William Bewick that describes Hazlitt's “jottings” on the walls of his home (153–54). Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt's commonplace book is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. As bibliographers such as Ronald McKerrow and, more recently, Marjorie Garber explain, inverted commas were associated with sententious remarks until around the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, they became associated with quotations.
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