The Pointe of the Pen: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Balletic Imagination

Originally a courtly art, ballet experienced dramatic evolution (but never, significantly, the prospect of extinction) as attitudes toward courtliness itself shifted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As a result, it afforded a valuable model to poets who, like Wordsworth and his successors, aspired to make the traditionally codified, formal, and, to some degree, aristocratic art of poetry compatible with the very language of men and, therefore, relevant to a new class of readers. Moreover, as a model, ballet was visible as well as valuable. Dance historians recount the extraordinary popularity of ballet and its practitioners in the nineteenth century, and The Pointe of the Pen challenges literary historians\u27 assertions - sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit - that writers were immune to the balletomania that shaped both Romantic and Victorian England, as well as Europe more broadly. The book draws on both primary documents (such as dance treatises and performance reviews) and scholarly histories of dance to describe the ways in which ballet\u27s unique culture and aesthetic manifest in the forms, images, and ideologies of significant poems by Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Barrett Browning.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1167/thumbnail.jp

Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins

Beginning with John Keats and tracing a line of influence through Alfred Lord Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Betsy Tontiplaphol draws on established narratives of the nineteenth century\u27s social and literary developments to describe the relationship between poetics and luxury in an age when imperial trade and domestic consumerism reached a fevered pitch. The luscious poem, as Tontiplaphol defines it, is a subset of the luxurious, a category that suggests richness in combination with enclosure and intimacy. For Keats, Tontiplaphol suggests, the psychological virtues of luscious experience generated a new poetics, one that combined his Romantic predecessors\u27 sense of the ameliorative power of poetry with his own revaluation of space, both physical and prosodic. Her approach blends cultural context with close attention to the formal and affective qualities of poetry as she describes the efforts of Keats and his equally ”though differently” anxious Victorian inheritors to develop textual spaces as luscious as the ones their language describes. For all three poets, that effort entailed rediscovering and reinterpreting the list, or catalogue, and each chapter\u27s textual and formal analyses are offered in counterpoint to careful examination of the century\u27s luscious materialities. Her book is at once a study of influence, a socio-historical critique, and a form-focused assessment of three century-defining voices.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1168/thumbnail.jp

This Living Hand: \u3cem\u3eBright Star\u3c/em\u3e and the Etsy Effect

This essay argues that the Keats portrayed in Jane Campion’s Bright Star is a product of the twenty-first century’s Etsy culture—and that this portrayal, if somewhat surprising or even counterintuitive, effectively captures Keats’s understanding of the relationship between poetic making and imperfection. The paper both compares Keats’s presence on the handicraft-marketing platform Etsy.com to his characterization in Campion’s hand-centric film and identifies the ways in which the Keats of contemporary popular culture has become an appealing and textually reasonable model for entrepreneurial crafters and other aspiring artisans

Wherewith They Weave a Paradise: Keats and the Luscious Poem

When Wordsworth and Coleridge occupy scanty plots and lime-tree bowers, they do so briefly and out of necessity, but Keats consistently describes islands, burrows, bedrooms, and pavilions dense with leafy and/or commercial luxury. More important, he posits such spaces as models for good verse, which, he contends, should feel “like a little copse.” To describe Keats’s regard for packed luxury (that is, circumscribed sensory excess), I choose the term luscious, a word whose etymological links to lush, plush, delicious, lascivious, and, of course, luxurious, render it uniquely suited to an aesthetic defined, paradoxically, by great (sensory) wealth in little space. The following essay argues that this un-Wordsworthian turn to crowded interiors represents not only a Keatsian thematic preoccupation but also, perhaps counterintuitively, Keats’s most significant formal legacy. Keats’s early connection to Leigh Hunt affiliates him with the luxury-loving bourgeoisie. However, less interested in domestic spaces than poetic ones, Keats rediscovered and redefined the catalogue, or poetic list, in an effort to translate gracious living into luscious verse