Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry by Michael Gamer (review)

Book Reviews Michael Gamer. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 307. $99.99. A sure sign ofa good critical book is surprise that it hasn’t been written be­ fore. This is so with Michael Gamer’s Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business ofPoetry, whose “primary interest lies ... in the tactics ofliterary production” (9). The argument is cogent, persuasive, and yet fresh. Gamer coins the term “re-collection,” which he defines “as the autho­ rized, transformational reprinting of works that have appeared earlier in some other form” (2). Re-collection allowed authors to combine concern with making their work salable, while maintaining artistic integrity: it “held out to writers the prospect ofa second chance” through “redirecting earlier work to more profitable or prestigious ends” (3). The poet, then, acts as a curator of their own work; displaying it, repositioning it, contextualizing it, and so on, as suits. Indeed, “If their curated literary corpuses tell us nothing else, they document ongoing, sometimes careerlong tugs of war between lucre and fame, profit and reputation, and selfcommodification and self-canonization” (10). Chapter One, “Corpus, Canon, and the Self-Collected Author,” consid­ ers how anthologies affected contemporary writers. The habit of antholo­ gies to include only dead authors, and not living ones, standardized since John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (1777—82), and in part explained by changes to copyright understandings after 1774, meant that the treatment ofdead and living authors diverged in terms of canonization; the dead poet could be lauded in ways that a living one could not. Hence, Gamer notes, Keats could comfort himself, during the storm of post-Endymion criticism, with the thought, “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.” There grew to be a sense that a poet’s death was in fact a dual death: the death of the human; and the death of the poet, to be memorial­ ized or grave-robbed by others. This brought about a concern among liv­ ing authors with shaping how they hoped to be canonized posthumously. Gamer outlines the often overlooked importance ofthe 1808 parliamentary debates and 1814 Copyright Act, and how they “focused [Romantic au­ thors’] attention on copyright and began to alter their own authorial behaviours accordingly” (45), especially with regard to their posthumous poetic legacy. SiR, 56 (Summer 2017) 285 286 BOOK REVIEWS Chapter Two, “Subscription Reprinting,” concerns Charlotte Smith, during the “relatively serene period (1786-89) when she was at the height of her popularity as a fashionable author” (57). The chapter explores “how economic opportunity impacts poetic and bibliographic form” through the case-study of Smith’s third and fifth editions of Elegiac Sonnets (57). During this period, Smith’s letters to her publisher, Thomas Cadell Sr., disclose an author “more caught up in the details of the publishing process than in the creative act” (Judith Phillips Stanton, editor of Smith’s Collected Letters, quoted, 73). The third edition’s additional paratextual materials turn what had previously been a pamphlet into “a collection”: “not a revision but a renovation” (60). The fifth edition was published by subscription, which Gamer argues was staggeringly unusual (79—80); indeed, it was “unique in being the only book of the 1780s to be published first commercially, and only later by subscription” (80). The chapter describes Smith’s adroitness in procuring that material previously published be purchased again (more ex­ pensively). In addition, Gamer shows how Smith strove to hide the entrepreneurialism, revealed by her publishing choices, in the Elegiac Son­ nets themselves. Chapter Three, “Bell’s Poetics,” examines the response to the Della Cruscans. It is not concerned, as others have been, with the Della Cruscans’ influence per se, but instead “what it means to move from newspaper to book” in terms of publication (92). Gamer “tracks the Della Cruscan movement from its beginnings in . . . the pages of The World newspaper and the two collections that grew out of it, Edward Topham’s Poetry ofthe World (1788) and John Bell’s British Album (1790)” (92). Gamer examines William Gifford’s poetical response, The Baviad: A Paraphrastic Imitation ofthe First Satire ofPersius (1791), and argues that Gifford...