Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge

Karen Swann

Published by Fordham University Press 2019

Lives of the Dead Poets

Keats, Shelley, Coleridge

Karen Swann

In the series Lit Z

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823284207

Overview
Contents

About this book

Lives of the Dead Poets explores the biographical interest that has marked the posthumous reception of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It argues that this fascination with the poetic life—a special case of the attachments we form to poetic figures—speaks to the mode of poetry’s survival into modernity.

Argues, against most critical orthodoxies, that our preoccupation with the lives of the famously dead romantic poets shouldn’t embarrass us: this attachment is deeply responsive to the most modern and radical elements of their writing.

Author / Editor information

Swann Karen :

Karen Swann is Morris Professor of Rhetoric Emerita in the Williams College English Department. She currently teaches at Bard Microcollege Holyoke.Karen Swann is Morris Professor of Rhetoric Emerita in the Williams College English Department. She currently teaches at Bard Microcollege Holyoke.

Reviews

Adela Pinch, University of Michigan:
Through brilliant, thoughtful, original analysis of the writings by and about three major poets of the romantic era, Swann untangles a central question at stake in author love: what counts as an author’s ‘life,’ anyway? Swann is possessed of a prose style that is both clear and, at times, breath-takingly surprising. A beautifully conceived, organized, and written study.

Marc Redfield, Brown University:
This is one of the most exquisitely-crafted books I have ever had the privilege of reading. Swann sets out to complicate the idea that biographical fascination is simply retrograde, sentimental, canonizing, or ideological; she shows how our fascination with these poets is bound up with the way they seem to live on past natural life, suspended in a kind of posthumous time. With modesty, tact, yet also with the assurance of a deeply felt calling, this book addresses the largest questions that we face as readers of literature: Why read? Why read poetry? What is it to love poetry? What is romantic poetry? How best to think about poetry’s, or romanticism’s, mode of afterlife or living-on in our dark times?

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Tracing Keats Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
2. The art of losing: Shelley’s Adonais Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
3. Shelley’s pod people Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
4. Late Coleridge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	92
5. Coleridge the talker Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Coda Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 272
Keywords: Allegory; Biography; Coleridge; Samuel Taylor; Commodity; Keats; John; Poet; Posthumous life; Shelley; Percy Bysshe

eBook

Published: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 9780823284207