Unfettering Poetry Fancy in British Romanticism [Paperback]

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century.Introduction: Definition and Description of the Fancy History of the Fancy and Its Trivialization The Romantic Lyric Subject Leigh Hunt, the Cockney School, and the Poetics of Cheerfulness The Poetry and Translations of Leigh Hunt (1811-1818) The Poetics of Expiration: Late Lyrics of Felicia Hemans 'The Fancy': Pugilism, Dandies, and Poetry Mary Robinson's Poetry of the Fancy Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' A Cockney Anthology of the Fancy: Hazlitt's Select British Poets (1824)

'Unfettering Poetry will unsettle, excite and inspire all students and scholars of Romanticism. Challenging Coleridge's hierarchy of poetic faculties, Jeffrey Robinson presents a brilliant argument for the Fancy as the most spirited, searching and experimental form of Romantic writing- the source of a vital counter-poetics that continues to the present. Robinson redraws the landscape of Romantic literary culture and the scholarly/critical tradition; highlights the Della Cruscans, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans and Leigh Hunt as key proponents of the New Romantic Poetics; and enables us to read those poets alongside the canonical Wordsworth and Keats with fresh eyes and enhanced understanding.' - Nicholas Roe, University of St Andrews, Scotland

'Jeffrey C. Robinson's new book rethinks the shifting, often contradictory Romantic concept of 'fancy' in ways that release it from its traditional positioning as the degraded and impoverished sibling of a privileged 'imagination.' By attending with a fresh eye to Romantic critical discourse and to poetic practices based upon continuing investments in the agency of 'fancy,' Robinson is able to offer surprising lS(