Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry [Hardcover]

In the Romantic?period's economics of 'fiat' money the legacy of romanticism involves absolutist gestures of verbal fiat. Focused on William Wordsworth, but in constant range of his poet-successors and modern critics, Romantic Fiat presents an argument for a double romantic signature of 'let there be' and 'let be.'Acknowledgments Introduction: Fiat in Lyric PART I: GIVING COMMANDS AND LETTING GO Romanticism and 'Exaggeration of Thought' The Command to Nature? Wordsworth's Useless Fiat in The Old Cumberland Beggar PART II: ONTOLOGY AND THE LYRIC Between Cant and Anguish: Hume in Coleridge's Imagination? Wordsworth and the Beautiful Day PART III: BLESSING CURSING Contracting Obi: Shelley's Cosmopolitanism and the Curse of Poetry? Paper Money Poets Coda: Nature Poets and Fiat Money Index

In the course of the volume, Lindstrom gathers an impressive number of 'let be' statements . . . From discussions of Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' and 'The Old Cumberland Beggar' to Shelley's Peter Bell and Byron's Don Juan, the book accomplishes something that is all too rare in scholarship . . . the book changes what one notices in a poetry that has become all too familiar . . . I conclude with an injunction: 'do not let this book be,' by which I mean, read this book. - Studies in Romanticism