Abstract
As the long shadow of Tennyson began to retreat in the 1880s, poetry found itself without clear directions for form or content. The temporality of the decade is a kind of anti-teleological anticipation--poets felt that something new needed to happen, but what that advent was remained unspecified. These conditions left a space for ‘minor poetry’, a term that implies not a position on a scale of value but a field of innovation and experimentation. This chapter first surveys the way this shifting ground is captured in anthologies, and discusses how the poetry of the decade resists easy capture in literary history. It then goes on to explore how the temporality of the 1880s is reflected in W. E. Henley’s ‘In Hospital’ sequence of lyric poems.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition |
Subtitle of host publication | The 1880s |
Editors | Penny Fielding, Andrew Taylor |
Place of Publication | Cambridge |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Chapter | 4 |
Pages | 80-97 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781107181908 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 17 Oct 2019 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- minor poetry
- anthologies
- Louis Untermeyer
- Arthur Symons
- W. E. Henley
- lyric
- temporality
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Penny Fielding
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures - Grierson Chair of English Literature
Person: Academic: Research Active