This dissertation challenges the critical commonplace that British Romantic poetry was primarily expressive. Instead, this project takes seriously poets’ aspirations to convey “the very language of men” or to compose “conversation poems,” arguing that the period’s verse was not merely communicative but conversational. More particularly, by reading Romantic poetry and poetic theory alongside an interdisciplinary mix of literary criticism, philosophies of language and materialism, gender studies, and eighteenth-century natural science, the dissertation proposes that this “very language of men” generated its social power from nonverbal communication. It particularly focuses on the neglected connections between “natural signs”—such as gestures, facial expressions, and sublingual utterances— and contemporaneous debates on poetic form. Whether experimenting with meter or fixating on their interlocutors’ “looks,” writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley hoped to augment poetry’s unique ability to inspire visceral responses in their readers.
To address the somatic and environmental elements of communication in Romantic verse, the dissertation uncovers the marked affinities between Romantic poetic form and conversational protocols. Like poetry, conversation is comprised of words and unspoken cues. And because it must be incomplete to continue, it relies upon imperfect communication to perpetually foster exchanges between interlocutors, however fraught the results. For the Romantics, then, mutual understanding need not be synonymous with language, affective mirroring, or metaphors of mindreading. In fact, as they knew, the irreducible differences between interlocutors intensify their connections, even (and especially) when they unearth disturbing insights into how “human nature” is not always humane. More broadly, this dissertation suggests that the Romantic conception of conversational poetics, as an embodied and response-oriented medium, should inform how we may conceive of verse’s communicative potential in the present day, liberating lyric poetry from its more exclusive associations with the isolated speaking voice and material text.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Literatures in English
Subject (authority = LCSH)
Topic
English poetry—19th century—Criticism and interpretation
Subject (authority = LCSH)
Topic
Romanticism
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
School of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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