On Form Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word

by Leighton, Angela

• ISBN13: 9780199551934
• ISBN10: 0199551936
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, havereturned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the singlemost important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.

Author Biography

Angela Leighton is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is the author of a number of books, including Shelley and the Sublime, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, as well as many essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature.

Table of Contents

Form's Matter: A Retrospective

Art for Art: On Pots, Crocks, Lyres, and Flutes

Touching Forms: Tennyson and Aestheticism

Aesthetic Conditions: Pater's Re-Forming Style

Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee's Ghostly Aesthetics

Just a Word: On Woolf

Yeats's Feet

Wallace Stevens' Eccentric Souvenirs

W. S. Graham: In the Mind's Ear

Forms of Elegy: Stevenson, Muldoon, Hill, Fisher

Elegies of Form: Bishop, Plath, Stevenson

Nothing, but: An Afterword

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