Writers, readers, and critics have debated the history of the novel at least as long as the form has existed. In this century, the two- volume English edition of Franco Moretti's The Novel (first published in five Italian volumes between 2001 and 2003), offering a number of new histories, advertises itself as ‘a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form’. Variations on the novel's origin story were already rife by the late eighteenth century, however, with early attempts to distinguish it from other narrative modes. Among these, Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance (1785) depicts a group of friends discussing the history of literary forms, one of which proposes ‘to trace Romance to its Origin, to follow its progress through the different periods to its declension, to shew how the modern Novel sprung up out of its ruins’. Amid rapid changes in print technologies and readerships changing as a result of major socio- economic developments, a retrospective fantasy was emerging, reimagining that complex cultural shift as a specific traceable point in which the modern novel had ‘sprung up’.

Three centuries investigating the novel's advance as both a literary form and a literary commodity beg the question addressed by this chapter: Why hasn't there been similar interest in an analogous history of the modern poetry collection? One reasonable response is that the forms are hardly analogous. The novel has an inherent formal integrity that might be shared by some published volumes of poetry, but thematically or narratively cohesive book- length poems or sequences are still a minority among more miscellaneous collections of discrete short lyrics. And if the individual poem remains the basic unit of most contemporary poetry, we have plenty of histories of ‘the lyric’, which correspond in many ways to the novel's ascendance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, the poetry book – as both an immaterial conceit and physical object – is as codified as ever, both for poets and for poetry's circulation in contemporary culture. Exerting something like the pressure short story writers might feel towards the novel, the so- called full- length collection remains, in Joel Brouwer's words, ‘the coin of the realm in the poetry world’.