A Moment's Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-century English SonnetA Moment's Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet argues that the history of the sonnet in the last century is more than a decorative strand in its literary fabric. To a large extent, this book is about Wordsworth, who discovers, through Milton, that at the heart of the sonnet's power as a form is the trope of synecdoche, which he connects up with the very moment and act of representation - thereby "inventing" the visionary Romantic sonnet. The authority he gains by this discovery immediately reflects not only on his work, which until that moment had rarely included the sonnet, but also on the work of many major poets after him. The book also discusses Wordsworth's rejection of a sentimental mode of sonnet writing popularized by female poets of his day; instead Wordsworth insists on a "manly" (his word) employment of the form that transforms the voice of private sentiment into the voice of public, bardic authority. |
Contents
| 9 | |
Wordsworths Inquest and the Visionary Sonnet | 27 |
The Conspiring Reader | 64 |
Keatss Sonnets | 81 |
Sonnettomania and the Ideology of Form | 115 |
Revisionary Poetics | 129 |
The Allegory | 151 |
What to Make of a Diminished Thing | 175 |
Bibliographical Listing of NineteenthCentury | 192 |
Works Cited233 | 233 |
Index | 248 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic apocalyptic becomes Caine called century chapter Christ Claude Colleer Abbott closure conflation consciousness critics D. G. Rossetti Dante Gabriel Rossetti dark death describes dialectic discussion English Sonnets epic essays figures of form form's formal Frost's sonnets Gerard Manley Hopkins highlights Hopkins's Ibid imaginative John Keats Keats's sonnets letter light London look lyric memory ment metaphor Milton mode moment's monument moments movement nature notion octave octave and sestet Ozymandias painting paradox perception perspective Petrarchan poem poem's poet poet's poetic form poetry quatrain quoted radiance reading relation resistance revision revisionary poetic rhyme Robert Frost romantic self-reflexivity sense sequence sestet Shelley Shelley's sonnets sonnet 12 sonnet 50 sonnet form sonnet writing sound space spatial stanza star structure sublime suggests synecdoche temporality terza rima thematic thou thought tion tradition trope University Press Victorian vision visionary sonnet voice William word Wordsworth Wordsworth's sonnets Wordsworthian York
Popular passages
Page 71 - The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. What
Page 112 - Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (Lines
Page 54 - sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is
Page 98 - face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the fairy power
Page 69 - And what if she had seen those glories fade, Those titles vanish, and that strength decay; Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid When her long life hath reached its final day: Men we are, and must grieve when even the Shade Of that which once was great, is passed away.
Page 103 - No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft swell and fall, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death. (Lines
Page 167 - I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is— Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.
Page 75 - unfilled field,— An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,— Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A Senate, Time's worst statute, unrepealed,— Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. The
Page 41 - to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office.
Page 94 - O ye who have your eyeballs vext and tir'd, Feast them upon the wideness of the sea; O ye whose ears are dinned with uproar rude, Or fed too much with cloying melody— Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth and brood Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired.