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Full-Text Articles in Poetry
Reclaiming The Female Melancholic Artist In Charlotte Smith’S Elegiac Sonnets, Emily Denommé
Reclaiming The Female Melancholic Artist In Charlotte Smith’S Elegiac Sonnets, Emily Denommé
2016 Undergraduate Awards
Charlotte Smith is often considered a proto-Romantic poet, and her Elegiac Sonnets a precursor to the Romantic poetry of the next century. However, Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets is also heavily influenced by late-eighteenth century currents of thought, most especially the cult of sentiment that had extreme literary significance in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Additionally, changing perceptions of the melancholic artistic genius as a specifically male figure meant that Smith, as a poet for whom melancholy in Elegiac Sonnets was a central element of her artistry, had to demonstrate her claim, as a woman, to the space of the …
Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell
Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell
English Faculty Publications
This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.