Elizabeth Barrett Browning evokes several figures as muses for her poetry, and one recurring type is the music master. While her writing has always been recognized as highly experimental, the influence and use of music in her work have not been fully examined. Fresh Strange Music defines the exact nature of Browning's experiments and innovations in rhythm, which she called the "animal life" of poetry, and in sound repetition, which she labelled her "rhymatology."  Donald Hair approaches Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art with a focus on the power that shapes it - the technical music of her poetry and the recurring beat at the beginning of units of equal time that requires a different system of scansion than conventional metres and syllable counting. Music for Barrett Browning, Hair explains, has momentous implications. In her early poetry, it is the promoter of kindly and loving relations in families and in society. Later in her career, she makes it the basis of nation-building, in her support for the unification of Italy and, more problematically, in her championing of French emperor Napoleon III.   Fresh Strange Music traces the development of Barrett Browning's poetics through all her works - from the early An Essay on Mind to Last Poems - showcasing her as a major poet, independently minded, and highly innovative in her rhythms and rhymes.

Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language

Literature & Fiction

Hair, Donald S.

British & Irish

McGill-Queen's University Press

The study of language was central to the thinking of Tennyson and his circle of friends. The period of his education was a time of interest in the subject, as a new form of philology became widely known and accepted in Britain. In this study, Donald S. Hair discusses Tennyson’s own view of language, and sets them in the context of the language theories of his day.The scope of the book is broad. Hair draws upon a wide range of Tennyson’s poetry, from a quatrain he wrote at the age of eight to an ‘anthem-speech’ he wrote at the age of eighty-two, and pays particular attention to two major works: In Memoriam and Idylls of the King.He explores these in relation to the two theoretical traditions Tennyson inherited. One is derived from Locke and the language theory set out in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the other from Coleridge and the language theory of what Mill called the ‘Germano-Coleridgian’ tradition. He goes back to Plato’s Cratylus and Aristotle’s On Interpretation, and forward to the continental philology introduced into England by Tennyson’s friends, Kemble and Trench, among others. Finally, he links Tennyson’s language to thinkers such as Whewell, Hallam, and Maurice, who are not in themselves philologists but who make language part of their concerns—and Whewell was Tennyson’s tutor, Hallam and Maurice his friends.Hair offers a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory in Britain while also providing some close readings of key passages of Tennyson’s work and examinations of the poet’s faith and views of society.

Tennyson's Language

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning offers an accessible and authoritative guide to the essentials of Robert Browning’s life and poetry. Drawing from his personal letters and from the diaries and memoirs of his contemporaries, this literary biography provides a wealth of information about the main events of his life, including the social, political, religious, and aesthetic issues that concerned him; it offers critical commentary defining the central characteristics of his poetry; and it tracks the changes in his reputation through contemporary reviews and the growth of the Browning societies. An English poet who was deeply responsive to European culture and affairs, Robert Browning has sometimes been dismissed by modern readers for his obscurity or roughness of language. Now two distinguished scholars of Browning’s work trace the arc of his development as an artist and thinker from his earliest poems to the last in his long and remarkably productive career. The authors illustrate how Browning moved from describing “incidents in the development of a soul,” to developing his reader’s soul as collaborator in the artistic process, to the development of his own soul in the making of poetry. Through a fresh reading of not only his poetry but also the letters of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they have garnered details that situate the two in historical context, provide a vivid sense of Robert’s personality, and also correct biases against Elizabeth’s influence. Their critical commentary focuses on the poet’s dramatic imagination and argues that his extensive body of work after The Ring and the Book—often dismissed as evidencing a decline in his poetic powers—represented new directions in his poetry marked by inventive dialogue, verbal puzzles, and virtuoso rhyming. Written to appeal to both general readers and scholars, the book will enable anyone to read Browning’s poems with a firm sense of the subjects and practices that are central to his texts, along with a knowledge of their context in the poet’s life and thought. The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning invites readers of a singular body of poetry to achieve a new understanding of Browning’s work and a greater appreciation of his life.

The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life (Volume 1)

Biographies & Memoirs

Kennedy, Richard S.

Arts & Literature

University of Missouri

 The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning offers an accessible and authoritative guide to the essentials of Robert Browning’s life and poetry. Drawing from his personal letters and from the diaries and memoirs of his contemporaries, this literary biography provides a wealth of information about the main events of his life, including the social, political, religious, and aesthetic issues that concerned him; it offers critical commentary defining the central characteristics of his poetry; and it tracks the changes in his reputation through contemporary reviews and the growth of the Browning societies.            An English poet who was deeply responsive to European culture and affairs, Robert Browning has sometimes been dismissed by modern readers for his obscurity or roughness of language. Now two distinguished scholars of Browning’s work trace the arc of his development as an artist and thinker from his earliest poems to the last in his long and remarkably productive career.            The authors illustrate how Browning moved from describing “incidents in the development of a soul,” to developing his reader’s soul as collaborator in the artistic process, to the development of his own soul in the making of poetry. Through a fresh reading of not only his poetry but also the letters of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they have garnered details that situate the two in historical context, provide a vivid sense of Robert’s personality, and also correct biases against Elizabeth’s influence. Their critical commentary focuses on the poet’s dramatic imagination and argues that his extensive body of work after The Ring and the Book—often dismissed as evidencing a decline in his poetic powers—represented new directions in his poetry marked by inventive dialogue, verbal puzzles, and virtuoso rhyming.             Written to appeal to both general readers and scholars, the book will enable anyone to read Browning’s poems with a firm sense of the subjects and practices that are central to his texts, along with a knowledge of their context in the poet’s life and thought. The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning invites readers of a singular body of poetry to achieve a new understanding of Browning’s work and a greater appreciation of his life.

The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life

As the author notes in his introduction, this fascinating and insightful book is "family history with a context." Placing the lives of his parents, John Hair and Alice Runnalls, at the centre of the narrative, Dr. Hair explores the history and culture of Southwestern Ontario, that great peninsula of fertile farmland lying between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. Dubbed "Souwesto" in the 1960s by artist Greg Curnoe and playwright James Reaney, the region was home to the kind of people that Alice Munro writes about in her short stories--people mostly of Scots-Irish descent; Protestant; practical, hard-working people attached to the land, defining their community as their school section and their social milieu as their rural Methodist or Presbyterian church. Souwesto Lives tells their story, beginning in the first days of European settlement, continuing through the clearing of "the bush" and into the twentieth century, when the coming of the telephone and rural electrification marked the beginning of social and technological changes that would change the area forever. It is a story of the movement from country to city, from family farm to suburban lot, told with verve and affection. Natives of Souwesto, historians and genealogists, and the general reader all will find much to treasure in this detailed portrait of a region, its people, and a family.

Souwesto Lives: John Hair and Alice Runnalls

History

Americas

Rock's Mills Press

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable coming of age, not only for Canadian literature but also for Canadian universities. As a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, Donald S. Hair experienced both of these transformations firsthand. In this engaging memoir, Hair looks back over his long career. He discusses his encounters with (and impressions of) such prominent figures in Canadian literature as Margaret Atwood, Stan Dragland, Timothy Findley, Jay Macpherson, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, James Reaney, and many others. The book also provides insight into the evolution of Canadian higher education, including the ongoing battle between advocates of a teaching-centred approach and those who viewed research as the foremost priority of the academy. Along the way, Hair discusses the contributions of such renowned literary scholars as Northrop Frye, F.E.L. Priestley, Carl Klinck, and A.S.P. Woodhouse. The 1960s and '70s also saw an efflorescence of cultural activity across Canada, including London, Ontario and the surrounding counties of southwestern Ontario. Hair's descriptions of the area's arts scene during the heyday of what came to be called the London Regionalism movement open a window into another era, as do his descriptions of such leading artists in that movement as Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers. Also central to the narrative is Hair's friendship with Governor-General's Award-winning poet and playwright James Reaney, with whom Hair taught for many years at Western University. The story recounted in A Professor's Life holds (to borrow the author's own words) "the basic appeal of the life story that everyone has to tell" as well as "the appeal of the historical context in which a life is lived, the kind of ap-peal that answers the question 'What was it like, to live then, to work in that place and time?'" The book is, in the end, a wholly absorbing account of a meaningful life well-lived.

A Professor's Life

Historical

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