Abstract
In the poetry it has inspired over time, melancholy has left memorable and precious tracks and traces. This chapter will address the question of how poetry finds terms for, and how it comes to terms with, melancholy in the eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the first half and the middle decades, with the cult of darkness and gloom manifest in the graveyard poetry tradition, and concluding with William Cowper. The voices are various and distinct, and only a few will be heard here, but it will soon be apparent that melancholy provokes (and inspires) an ambivalent response, is as much praised and prized as it is feared and endured.
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Notes
Henri Michaux, Plume précédé de Lointain intérieur ( Paris: Gallimard, [ 1938 ] 1963 ).
Anne Amend, ‘Mélancolie’, in Michel Delon (ed.), Dictionnaire européen des Lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 698–701, p. 698.
John F. Sena, ‘Melancholy in Anne Finch and Elizabeth Carter: The Ambivalence of an Idea’, in The Yearbook of English Studies (1971), vol. 1, pp. 108–19, p. 116.
William B. Ober, ‘Madness and Poetry: A Note on Collins, Cowper, and Smart’ [1970], Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men’s Afflictions (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 137–92, p. 153.
Dustin Griffin, ‘Collins, William (1721–1759)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 ), vol. 12, p. 740.
William B. Ober, ‘Madness and Poetry: A Note on Collins, Cowper, and Smart’ [1970], Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men’s Afflictions (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 137–92, p. 153.
Dustin Griffin, ‘Collins, William (1721–1759)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 ), vol. 12, p. 740.
David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (eds), Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology ( Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1999 ), p. 1.
John Pomfret, Miscellany Poems, On Several Occasions ( London: Printed for John Place, 1702 ).
Matthew Green, The Spleen, and Other Poems with a Prefatory Essay by J. Aikin, M.D. (London: Printed for T. Cadell, junr. and W. Davies, [1737] 1796 ).
John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem ( London: Printed for A. Millar, 1744 ).
Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State College Press, 1951 ), p. 178.
David B. Morris, ‘A Poetry of Absence’, in John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 225–48, p. 234.
See Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, ‘Introduction: The Poet in the Graveyard’, Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’ Illustrated by William Blake: A Study with Facsimile ( London: Scolar Press, 1982 ), pp. 3–17.
Mary S. Hall, ‘On Light in Young’s Night Thoughts’, Philological Quarterly, 48 (1969), pp. 452–63.
William Cowper, ‘Retirement’, The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 1, 1748–82, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 ), p. 381.
John Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 2nd edn ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 ).
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© 2011 Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson
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Baker, J. (2011). ‘Strange Contrarys’: Figures of Melancholy in Eighteenth-Century Poetry. In: Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306592_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306592_4
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