The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Romanticism in Perspective)

by RichardCronin (Author)

• New

  Hardcover
  2000

  $105.75

  In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language, and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.