Abstract
As Chapter 1 argued, Smith and Wordsworth established the Romantic fascination with experimentation by engaging creatively with the physical properties of poetry. Smith’s initial, tentative novelties of the late 1780s, and her more assured and thoroughgoing innovations as Elegiac Sonnets progressed and enlarged, found their counterpart in Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads. Both poets created poetic hybrids of resonant, sounding poetry. For both, this activity facilitated an understanding of poetry as fluid, flexible, and changeable. Their willingness to work with their material demonstrates that both poets participated in the period’s general interest in understanding causes, effects, and principles, and in so doing bedded in experimentation as a value of Romanticism. Their interest in the possibilities of hybridization is one response to what Sophie Thomas has called “a new disciplinary and classificatory impulse,” something she associates in particular with the establishment of museums and public shows that characterize the period.1 In 1807, both poets published (Smith posthumously) collections of poetry that offered a follow-up to their 1790s poetics: in Beachy Head: with Other Poems and Poems, in Two Volumes, Smith and Wordsworth moved from hybridity to taxonomy, their books exploring the interrelations between the making of poetry, the naming of poetry, the science of poetry, and the impact of poetry.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
“‘Things on Holiday’: Collections, Museums, and the Poetics of Unruliness,” ERR 20.2 (2009): 167–75, p. 167.
“Multum in parvo”: much in little. See Curran, “Multum in Parvo: Wordsworth’s Poems, In Two Volumes of 1807,” in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 234–53.
Letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807. See The Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; repr. 1990), p. 100.
Porter, “Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin’s Loves of the Plants,” European Romantic Review 18.2 (2007): 213–21, pp. 214, 219.
See Paul C. Rosenblatt, Metaphors of Family Systems Theory: Toward New Constructions (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1994), pp. 59, 51. See also Ingrid Broszeit-Rieger, “Family Systems Theory and ‘The Man of Fifty Years’ in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years,” Romanticism and Parenting: Image, Instruction and Ideology, ed. Carolyn A. Weber (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 74–86, p. 76.
Rodney Farnsworth, Mediating Order and Chaos: The Water-Cycle in the Complex Adaptive Systems of Romantic Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 11.
See Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
See British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 13 passim. Gall images the brain as a fruit, Herder as a flower (p. 35).
Sophie Thomas, “‘Things on Holiday’: Collections, Museums, and the Poetics of Unruliness,” European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009): 167–75, p. 169.
Andrea Henderson, “Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie’s ‘Introductory Discourse,’” PMLA 112.2 (1997): 198–213, p. 202. Judith Pascoe, on the other hand, challenges this association between the urge to collect and the urge to dominate, instead interpreting collecting as an enactment of self-sustaining fantasies. See The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 173.
Theresa M. Kelley, “Romantic Exemplarity: Beauty and ‘Material’ Culture,” Romantic Science, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003): 223–54, p. 225.
The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 37, 44.
Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 6–7.
Heather I. Sullivan describes “the mystical vision of nature held by Novalis: everything in the world is connected in an overall unity and it is our task to seek out and participate in the harmonious patterns of becoming”; in other words, to realize the powerful nature of the collection. “Collecting the Rocks of Time: Goethe, the Romantics and Early Geology,” European Romantic Review 10.3 (1999): 341–70, p. 350.
“Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) and the Epideictic Tradition,” in Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature, eds. Don H. Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 108–21, p. 116.
See “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and ‘Beachy Head,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59.3 (2004): 281–314, p. 311.
The most accessible version is Helen Darbishire’s edition of 1914, which separates Wordsworth’s notes from the Editor’s and does not attach the Fenwick additions. See Wordsworth: Poems, in Two Volumes 1807, ed. Darbishire (1952; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914).
Copyright information
© 2011 Jacqueline M. Labbe
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Labbe, J.M. (2011). 1807: The Art of Poetry on a New Plan. In: Writing Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306141_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306141_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33064-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-30614-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)