Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-tsvsl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-26T03:12:18.103Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Critical Approval of Epic Poetry in the Age of Wordsworth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald M. Foerster
Donald M. Foerster*
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Uring wordsworth's lifetime, the epic lost a good deal of its prestige in England. One reason was of course the growing tendency to regard literature not as static and unchanging but as essentially organic and evolutionary. Believing that a principle of progress is secretly operative in the mind of man and therefore in the things he writes, many critics were now disposed to brand the epic as an outmoded form of literature and to censure earlier neo-classicists for their high praise of this particular genre. They suggested that, for the modern world at least, there is considerably more of worth and of interest in the spontaneous self-expression of the lyric and in the skillful character-probing of the Elizabethan drama and of the modern novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1955 , pp. 682 - 705
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Note 1 in page 682 “The Critical Attack on the Epic in the English Romantic Movement,” PMLA, lxix (June 1954), 432–447.

Note 2 in page 685 Since Boyd, Hunt, Shelley, and others spoke of the Divine Comedy as an epic and compared it directly with Paradise Lost, it seems fitting that the present paper should consider estimates of Dante in the Romantic period.

Note 3 in page 685 The Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Boyd (London, 1802), p. 10.

Note 4 in page 685 “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley's Literary and Philosophical Criticism, ed. John Shaw-cross (London, 1932), p. 124.

Note 5 in page 685 Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London, 1936), p. 161.

Note 6 in page 686 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto, 1930), v, 52.

Note 7 in page 686 Essays and Marginalia (London, 1851), i 5.

Note 8 in page 686 Quarterly Review, xxxvi (June 1827), 45, 50.

Note 9 in page 686 Sometimes the Ideas were thought of as residing in the mind of the poet or as being grasped by the poet directly from the Ideal world.

Note 10 in page 687 Divina Commedia, p. 5.

Note 11 in page 687 Imagination and Fancy, 3rd ed. (London, 1846), p. 64.

Note 12 in page 687 The Writings of Arthur Eallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York, 1943), p. 256.

Note 13 in page 687 Complete Works (New York, 1853), vi, 479.

Note 14 in page 687 “Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 164.

Note 15 in page 687 Life of Geojfrey Chaucer (London, 1803), i 223.

Note 16 in page 688 xlvii (Jan. 1828), 20.

Note 17 in page 688 Complete Works, iv, 43.

Note 18 in page 688 Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets (London, 1807), ii, 484.

Note 19 in page 688 Shelley's Literary Criticism, p. 136.

Note 20 in page 688 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Philadelphia, 1842), i 329.

Note 21 in page 688 Complete Works, v, 57.

Note 22 in page 688 An Essay on English Poetry (London, 1848), pp. 97–98.

Note 23 in page 689 Evenings in Autumn (Loudon, 1822), ii, 286.

Note 24 in page 689 The Ruminator (London, 1813), i 200–201.

Note 25 in page 689 The Complete Works of W. S. Landor, ed. T. Earle Welby (London, 1927), v, 238.

Note 26 in page 690 Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 163.

Note 27 in page 690 Shelley's Literary Criticism, p. 146.

Note 28 in page 690 Essays and Tales in Prose (Boston, 1853), ii, 160–161.

Note 29 in page 690 The Life of Milton (Dublin, 1797), p. 290.

Note 30 in page 690 Lectures, ii, 315.

Note 31 in page 690 Essays and Tales, ii, 163.

Note 32 in page 691 See Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler (New York, 1877), i, 301.

Note 33 in page 692 George Dyer, Poems (London, 1802), p. xiv.

Note 34 in page 693 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selin-court (Oxford, 1939), pp. 377, 817.

Note 35 in page 694 Evenings in Autumn, ii, 2, 4, 189.

Note 36 in page 694 Cyrus Redding, Literary Reminiscences and Memories of Thomas Campbell (London, I860), i, 112.

Note 37 in page 695 The Iliad of Homer, ed. W. M. Trollope (London, 1827), i, xviii.

Note 38 in page 695 The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic (London, 1807), i, lxvii–lxviii.

Note 39 in page 695 William Taylor, A Historic Survey of German Poetry (London, 1830), i 291.

Note 40 in page 695 Introductions to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets (Boston, 1842), pp. 79–80, 125.

Note 41 in page 695 Evenings in Autumn, pp. 13–14, 23.

Note 42 in page 696 “Lectures on Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine, Ser. ii, Vol. i (1821), 137.

Note 43 in page 696 Reminiscences (New York, 1825), i, 13.

Note 44 in page 696 Ruminalor, i, 57.

Note 45 in page 696 Letters (Edinburgh, 1811), iv, 265, 267.

Note 46 in page 696 Fragments in Prose and Verse (London, 1809), i 7–8.

Note 47 in page 697 “Blackwood's, xxx (1831), 829; xxx (1832), 125.

Note 48 in page 697 New Monthly Magazine, Ser. ii, Vol. xx (1827), 8; ii (1821), 12.

Note 49 in page 697 Prose Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1876), iii, 168.

Note 50 in page 697 Imagination and Fancy, pp. 5–6.

Note 51 in page 697 Fragments, i, 137.

Note 52 in page 698 Preface, The Iliad of Homer (London, 1715).

Note 53 in page 698 Ruminator, i, 57.

Note 54 in page 698 Evenings in Autumn, ii, 194.

Note 55 in page 698 The Letters of P. B. Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen (London, 1909), ii, 833.

Note 56 in page 699 Essays and Marginalia, ii, 51.

Note 57 in page 699 Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, 3rd ed. (London, 1856), p. 61.

Note 58 in page 699 Reminiscences, i 14.

Note 59 in page 699 New Monthly Magazine, Ser. ii, ii (1821), 15.

Note 60 in page 699 Imagination and Fancy, pp. 27–28.

Note 61 in page 699 Blackwood's, xxxi (1832), 178 ff.

Note 62 in page 700 Winter Nights (London, 1820), ii, 3.

Note 63 in page 700 Essay on the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh, 1807), p. 122.

Note 64 in page 700 New Monthly Magazine, Ser. ii, xx, ii (1827), 8–9.

Note 65 in page 700 Imagination and Fancy, p. 62.

Note 66 in page 701 Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith (Boston and New York 1921), p. 7.

Note 67 in page 701 “Keble's Lectures on Poetry, 1832–1841, trans. Ε. K. Francis (Oxford, 1912), i 53, 90.