The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS One thing that this book about the isolated and perverse Romantic poet has taught me is that writing may be somewhat perverse—it may even be slightly melancholic—but it is never truly solitary. This study has been written with and for many wonderful people—the genii of this book on Romantic genius. The book has also partaken of the genii loci of a number of places over the space of its composition, from Santa Barbara to Calgary to Stanford to West Lafayette, Indiana. I will never be able to return the gifts I have received; to name as I do here is but to trace the lineaments of a love and friendship beyond words. My greatest debt of gratitude goes to Alan Liu, Garrett Stewart, Regenia Gagnier, and Barbara Gelpi, four critics who have been my inspirations in all things having to do with my career and my intellectual development. I am deeply indebted to a number of others: to Cory Davies, A. C. Hamilton, John Matthews, and Clive Thomson for their guidance early in my career; to Julie Carlson, Richard Corum, Richard Helgerson, Paul Hernadi, Hayden White, and Muriel Zimmerman for their generosity and inspiration during my time at UCSB; to Victor Ramraj and Fred Wah for their guidance and support while I was at the University of Calgary; to Jay Fliegelman, Maureen Harkin, Suvir Kaul, Joss Marsh, Robert Polhemus, David Riggs, and Jennifer Summit who aided and inspired me during my time at Stanford; to Ann Astell, Geraldine Friedman, Shaun Hughes, Beate Allert, Nancy Peterson, and Siobhan Somerville who helped me with my project during my time at Purdue; and to UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the University of Calgary’s Institute for the Humanities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Purdue Research Foundation for funding my work. I would also like to give special thanks to those scholars who have read and generously commented on portions of my book or offered advice and help in its final stages: Steven Bruhm, Jason Camlot, Joseph Childers, Richard Dienst, Michael Eberle-Sinatra,Andrew Elfenbein,Ghislaine McDayter,Arkady Plotnitsky, Kathy ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x Psomiades, Tilottama Rajan, Cannon Schmitt, Karen Swann, Herbert Tucker, and my two superb readers at SUNY.An earlier version of the Coda appeared as “Tennyson’s Idylls, Pure Poetry, and the Market” in SEL: Studies in English Literature 37: 4 (Autumn 1997). A short section of chapter 3 and of chapter 4 appeared in European Romantic Review (of the Taylor and Francis group at http://www.tandf.co.uk). Respectively, those were published as “‘With a most voiceless thought’: Byron and the Radicalism of Textual Culture,” ERR 8 (Winter 2000); and “The Fetish-Logic of Bourgeois Subjectivity, or, the Truth the Romantic Poet Reveals about the Victorian Novel” ERR 14: 2 (April 2003). Some material from chapter 4 appeared in “Novel Poetry:Transgressing the Law of Genre” in Victorian Poetry 41: 4 (Winter 2003). I thank those journals for permitting me to reprint that material here. Finally, my thanks go out to the graduate students in my Byron class at Purdue, who patiently bore with my Byron obsession in fall of 2001. My closest reader and my strongest critic in every stage of this project has been Emily Allen. Her genius and her gifts (in both senses) have most inspired me. She is my support and my guide in all things.The true heroes of this book on the metrical romance are my parents, who worked so hard and sacrificed so much for their children, and whose story reads like a romance of the New World.They have given me everything they could and I dedicate this book to them. ...