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George Eliot, Meter, and the Matter of Ideas: The Yale Poetry Notebook
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 82, Number 4, Winter 2015
- pp. 1179-1211
- 10.1353/elh.2015.0036
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article focuses on an unpublished notebook that George Eliot used in the 1870s to copy her own unpublished poems and prose reflections on form and versification. It reads the whole notebook as a response to Eliot’s reviewers’ accusations that in her poetry, forms and ideas were at destructive war with each other, and argues that Eliot used the notebook self-consciously, for textual, material, and metrical experiments which worked towards an alternative, speculative account of this relationship. The notebook is placed in the context of the extensive research into form and versification that Eliot conducted after the publication of The Spanish Gypsy, a Poem, revealing its connections to her interest in Hegel.