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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

John Sitter
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

Esther Greenwood, the twenty-year-old narrator of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, was studying literature in the 1950s, but her assumptions remain common in some quarters today:

There were lots of requirements and I didn’t have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I skipped it.

I hope this book will help readers overcome the barriers – ranging from Romantic and Modern myths to inexperience – that often dull our senses to eighteenth-century poetry. Early chapters aim to test and sharpen our hearing as readers; several of the later ones focus on vision. Along the way it should become clearer, to take the young Esther Greenwood’s preconceptions individually, that the period’s poets included many women as well as men, that they were no more smug on average than poets of other eras, that what complacency they harbored was not due to a confidence in reason (which they mostly distrusted), that they wrote blank verse, odes, and various other stanzaic forms as well as rhymed couplets, and that the couplets they did write were not automatically “little,” often aspiring instead, like the late twentieth-century poet A. R. Ammons, toward a versification capable of the “sweet ingestion” of nearly anything, a poetry “multiple and embracing.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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  • Introduction
  • John Sitter, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139029186.002
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  • Introduction
  • John Sitter, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139029186.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • John Sitter, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139029186.002
Available formats
×