To most literary historians, the name of Leigh Hunt does not rank very high. Hunt is mostly known as an idiosyncratic and mediocre poet, a versatile but slightly superficial critic, a man who taxed his friends' patience to the utmost, and - probably most notable of all - the man who exercised an evil influence on Keats. However, there is much more to Leigh Hunt than has hitherto been written about him. Hunt was a voracious reader who had a well-developed literary taste, and he was a true democrat in that he wanted "the interested layman" to share the enthusiasm which the reading and apprehension of poetry had given him. Hence, his essay What Is Poetry? which, apart from comments of a more theoretical kind, contains numerous examples from several ages and languages of what, in his opinion, qualified as fine poetry. His essay is inscribed in the line of theoretical writing on poetry that inspired Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to write their well-known treatises. Hunt distinguishes himself from those three in that his main emphasis is on the reader. What Is Poetry? is gently didactic in that it hopes that the reader would follow and benefit from his advice. Although not a text of sustained theoretical discussion, What Is Poetry? is, in its own idiosyncratic way, a valuable contribution to early 19th-century literary criticism. This book provides a long overdue analysis and critique of the essay, which, even today, is widely read and available. The book also examines Hunt's place in the Romantic movement as it sought to engage with the wider public. Hunt's achievement - apart from his gift as a talent scout and his altruistic assistance to budding geniuses - was that he strove to put his enormous, if erratic, learning at the disposal of ordinary people. This book is essential reading for all those engaged with poetry.

Leigh Hunt and What is Poetry?: Romanticism and the Purpose of Poetry

Biographies & Memoirs

Olsen, Flemming

Arts & Literature

Sussex Academic Press

The first decade of the 20th century witnessed a calling into question of some of the central positions held by the late 19th century Positivists. There was a shift of paradigm in science as well as art, as elicited by Einstein, William James, Freud, Picasso, Bergson and Pound. The insufficiency of the Positivist world picture became increasingly evident. Importantly, the concept of what was conventionally called reality, and legitimate ways of describing it, were being transformed.  Fenollosa’s long essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, was a ground-breaking, if idiosyncratic, poetic criticism, as well as a significant illustration of prevalent intellectual concerns. The role of the individual word in creating images was central to Fenollosa’s interest, as it was to the majority of contemporary poets and critics, but he found an intriguing prototype in the Chinese pictogram, which conveys an item of information via a concrete, more or less stylized, illustration. Flemming Olsen follows Fenollosa’s theorizing, showing the extent to which it is indebted to, and shaped by, post-Positivist tenets. The current cult of dynamism is reflected in Fenollosa’s idea of metaphor, which he sees as a linguistic manifestation of the Bergsonian élan, which is the driving force behind everything. This explains his predilection for sentences with a transitive verb, which signals action, and his aversion to the stasis of grammar, logic and the copula. Equally, truth is not seen by Fenollosa as the accordance between observed facts and some pre-established metaphysical entity, as held by positivist science, but as a labile concept; it is something that happens”, determined by a context  an idea pursued, for example, by the absurd” dramatists. The picture of reality” given by the poetical image could be just as truthful as the picture given by science. Reality thus moves from being our” reality, to become my” reality.  Fenollosa was not a literary critic; he was an orientalist by profession. Yet his linguistic ideas, although presented in a rudimentary form and without any elaborate terminology, foreshadow linguists’ concentration on, and analysis of, the medium just as much as the message. Pound’s contention that Fenollosa’s essay is a modern ars poetica is shown to be exaggerated; its interest rather lies in Fenollosa’s endeavour to go to the roots of poetic creation.

Ernest Fenollosa -- The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry: Ars poetica or The Roots of Poetic Creation?

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Liverpool University Press

Many of the ideas that appear in Arnold's Preface of 1853 to his collection of poems and in his later essays are suggested in the letters that Arnold wrote to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Analysis of the Preface reveals a poet who found a theoretical basis for poetry (by which he means literature in general) in the dramas of the Greek tragedians, particularly Sophocles: action is stressed as an indispensable ingredient, wholes are preferred to parts, the didactic function of literature is promoted -- in short, the Preface reads like the recipe for a classical tragedy. It is a young poet's attempt to establish criteria for what poetry ought to be. He found the Romantic idiom outworn. Literature was, in Arnold's perception, meant to communicate a message rather than impress by its structure or by formal sophistication. Modern theories of coalescence between content and form were outside the contemporary paradigm. T S Eliot's ambivalent attitude to Arnold -- now reluctantly admiring, now decidedly patronizing -- is puzzling. Eliot never seemed able to liberate himself from the influence of Arnold. What in Arnold's critical oeuvre attracted and at the same time repelled Eliot? That question has led to an in-depth analysis of Arnold as a literary critic. This book begins with an examination of Arnold's letters to Clough, where "it all started" and proceeds with a close reading of the 1853 Preface. A look at some of the later literary essays rounds off the picture of Arnold as a literary critic. This work is the result of Reader and Review comments of the author's well received Eliot's Objective Criticism: Tradition or Individual Talent? "Yet he is in some respects the most satisfactory man of letters of his age." -- T S Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

Literary Criticism of Matthew Arnold: Letters to Clough, the 1853 Preface and Some Essays

Essays & Correspondence

Several critics have been intrigued by the gap between late Victorian poetry and the more "modern" poetry of the 1920s. This book attempts to get to grips with the watershed by analysing one school of poetry and criticism written in the first decade of the 20th century until the end of the First World War. To many readers and critics, T.E. Hulme and the Imagists represent little more than a footnote. But they are more than mere stepping-stones in the transition. Besides being experimenting poets, most of them are acute critics of art and literature, and they made the poetic picture the focus of their attention. They are opposed not only to the monopoly of science, which claimed to be able to decide what truth and reality "really" are, but also to the predictability and insipidity of much of the poetry of the late Tennyson and his successors. Behind the discussions and experiments lay the great question What Is Reality? What are its characteristics? How can we describe it? Can we ever get to an understanding of it? Hulme and the Imagists deserve to be taken seriously because of their untiring efforts, and because they contributed to bringing about the reorientation that took place within the poetical and critical traditions.

Between Positivism and T.S. Eliot: Imagism and T.E. Hulme

University Press of Southern Denmark

The parallel between poetry and painting harks back to Antiquity. It seemed obvious because both arts appeal to the intellect, as well as the eye. In his Ars poetica (approx. 20 b.C.), Horace gave a terse formulation of the parallel: ut pictura poesis. Later critics dislodged what was in Horace an obiter dictum, from its context, in which Horace referred to the appropriate distance of a beholder/reader from a picture/text. In English literature, the Neo-Classical cult of the Ancients straddling the year 1700 produced a spate of translations of Horace's Ars poetica, and the translators' accompanying comments suggest a wide range of idiosyncratic applications of the Latin poet's maxim. One form of poetical expression of the parallel particularly favored by English Neo-Classical poets was landscape description. However, 'landscapes' had to fight opposition on two fronts, viz. the rigid Neo-Classical canon and the prevalent mold of the description of outdoor scenery, as seen in, for example, pastorals. This book traces the development of the maxim ut pictura poesis from a topos to a genre, viz. the Neo-Classical landscape poem. The typical poem belonging to that genre, which is given a detailed analysis in the book, contains a number of stock ingredients that meet the eyes of a beholder, who is also the narrator. Underneath the scene is a low-key social analogy; an intimation of a virtually unspoiled utopian society. At the same time, an undertone of anxiety for the preservation of this summum bonum is perceptible, and in James Thomson's landscapes dating from the 1720s, the reader feels the approach of the attitude to the items of natura naturata that we find in Wordsworth and Keats.

The Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition and English Neo-Classical Landscape Poetry (57) (University of Southern Denmark Studies in Literature)

British & Irish