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A collection of essays highlighting the pervasive, yet often unacknowledged, role of Romantic poetry and poetics on modern and contemporary innovative poetry

Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated “late-Romantic” poetry of the nineteenth century. The original essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by tracing the fundamental continuities between Romanticism’s poetic and political radicalism and the experimental movements in poetry from the late nineteenth century to the present day.
 
According to editors July Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, “active romanticism” is a poetic response, direct or indirect, to pressing social issues and an attempt to redress forms of ideological repression; at its core, “active romanticism” champions democratic pluralism and confronts ideologies that suppress the evidence of pluralism. “Poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race,” declared poet William Blake at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No other statement from the era of the French Revolution marks with such terseness the challenge for poetry to participate in the liberation of human society from forms of inequality and invisibility. No other statement insists so vividly that a poetic event pushing for social progress demands the unfettering of traditional, customary poetic form and language.
 
Bringing together work by well-known writers and critics, ranging from scholarly studies to poets’ testimonials, Active Romanticism shows Romantic poetry not to be the sclerotic corpse against which the avant-garde reacted but rather the wellspring from which it flowed.
 
Offering a fundamental rethinking of the history of modern poetry, Carr and Robinson have grouped together in this collection a variety of essays that confirm the existence of Romanticism as an ongoing mode of poetic production that is innovative and dynamic, a continuation of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition, and a form that reacts and renews itself at any given moment of perceived social crisis.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-viii
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  1. Introduction: Active Romanticism
  2. Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson
  3. pp. 1-17
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  1. 1. Bright Ellipses: The Botanic Garden, Meteoric Flowers, and Leaves of Grass
  2. Elizabeth Willis
  3. pp. 18-30
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  1. 2. “The Oracular Tree Acquiring”: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis
  2. Dan Beachy-Quick
  3. pp. 31-46
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  1. 3. Singing Schools and “Mental Equality”: An Essay in Three Parts
  2. Rachel Blau DuPlessis
  3. pp. 47-69
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  1. 4. A Deeper, Older O: The Oral (Sex) Tradition (in Poetry)
  2. Jennifer Moxley
  3. pp. 70-90
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  1. 5. The Construction of Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three and the Poems It Engendered
  2. Jerome Rothenberg
  3. pp. 91-98
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  1. 6. Copying Whitman
  2. Bob Perelman
  3. pp. 99-107
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  1. 7. “A Spark o’ Nature’s Fire”: Robert Burns and the Vernacular Muse
  2. Nigel Leask
  3. pp. 108-126
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  1. 8. Hyper-Pindaric: The Greater Irregular Lyric from Cowley to Keston Sutherland
  2. Simon Jarvis
  3. pp. 127-144
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  1. 9. Dysachrony: Temporalities and Their Discontents, in New and Old Romanticisms
  2. Judith Goldman
  3. pp. 145-175
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  1. 10. The Influence of Shelley on Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Avant-Garde Poetry: A Survey
  2. Jeffrey C. Robinson
  3. pp. 176-196
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  1. 11. The Dialectic of Romantic and Postromantic Ethopoetics (after Certain Hispano-American Visual Poetries)
  2. Heriberto Yépez, translated by Jen Hofer
  3. pp. 197-211
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  1. 12. The Sublime Is Now Again
  2. Julie Carr
  3. pp. 212-227
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  1. 13. Beyond Romanticism
  2. Jacques Darras
  3. pp. 228-233
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  1. 14. Accident over N: Lines of Flight in the Philosophical Notebooks of Novalis
  2. Andrew Joron
  3. pp. 234-248
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  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 249-264
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 265-270
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 271-276
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