Blake, Bacon, Dante, and Sir Geoffrey Keynes

The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: Nonesuch; New York: Random House, 1957. Pp. xv + 936. $12.50

Exile

Byron rehearsed going into exile in 1809, when he was twenty-one years old. Before setting sail for Lisbon, he wrote, “I leave England without regret, I shall return to it without pleasure. – I am like Adam the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab and thus ends my first Chapter” (BLJ 1: 211). Byron’s sardonic perception of himself as a biblical exile foreshadowed the allusive character of his second longer-term exile at the age of twenty-eight, when his carefully staged exit required an audience (some of the same friends and servants), expensive props (a replica of Napoleon’s carriage) and a literary precursor. On his last evening in England, Byron visited the burial place of the satirist Charles Churchill, and lay down on his grave. It was a performance of immense weariness with life and solidarity with an embittered outcast.Postprin

The Lake Poets

“If Southey had not been comparatively good,” writes Herbert F. Tucker, “he would never have drawn out Byron’s best in those satirical volleys that were undertaken, at bottom, in order to reprehend not the want of talent but its wastage.” And if Wordsworth and Coleridge had not been dangerously talented, Byron might have spared them some of his stinging sallies. In Table Talk Coleridge proclaimed the conclusion of the “intellectual war” Byron threatened in Don Juan (XI. 62: 496), declaring Wordsworth the poet who “will wear the crown,” triumphing over Byron and his ilk for the poetic laurels of the Romantic period. But Byron was not simply an opponent of his contemporaries. His responses to the Lake poets, particularly to Wordsworth, ran the gamut from “reverence” (HVSV, 129) then “nausea” (Medwin, 237) to Don Juan’s comical though cutting disdain, in under a decade. Focusing on Byron’s relationship with Wordsworth and Coleridge, I will show how Byron’s poetry and drama reveal the range and complexity of his dialogue with his older peers, where, even at their most apparently divergent, the conversation between the poets reveals the depth of the engagement across their works

Book illustration

Book synopsis: William Blake, poet and artist, is a figure often understood to have 'created his own system'. Combining close readings and detailed analysis of a range of Blake's work, from lyrical songs to later myth, from writing to visual art, this collection of thirty-eight lively and authoritative essays examines what Blake had in common with his contemporaries, the writers who influenced him, and those he influenced in turn. Chapters from an international team of leading scholars also attend to his wider contexts: material, formal, cultural, and historical, to enrich our understanding of, and engagement with, Blake's work. Accessibly written, incisive, and informed by original research, William Blake in Context enables readers to appreciate Blake anew, from both within and outside of his own idiom

Interview with Allen Gleckner

Allen Gleckner is a Senior Policy Associate at Fresh Energy. He is focused on aligning transmission market rules and state permitting towards broader regional deployment of clean electricity resources. Mr. Gleckner has worked on utility-scale and distribution-scale projects and policy

Lessons of Romanticism : a critical companion /

Includes bibliographical references and index

Reviews

John Beer, ed. Questioning Romanticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Pp. xiv + 319. ISBN 0-80-18-50525. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Pp. 231. ISBN 02-260-32019. Daniel P. Watkins, Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry. Gainesville, Fl: UP of Florida, 1996. Pp. xvii + 157. ISBN 0-8130-1438-7. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 Oxford UP, 1993 Pp. vvi + 337, 28 illustrations. ISBN 0-19-507584