Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Couplets and conversation
- 3 Political passions
- 4 Publishing and reading poetry
- 5 The city in eighteenth-century poetry
- 6 “Nature” poetry
- 7 Questions in poetics
- 8 Eighteenth-century women poets and readers
- 9 Creating a national poetry
- 10 The return to the ode
- 11 A poetry of absence
- 12 The poetry of sensibility
- 13 “Pre-Romanticism” and the ends of eighteenth-century poetry
- Index
1 - Introduction
the future of eighteenth-century poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Couplets and conversation
- 3 Political passions
- 4 Publishing and reading poetry
- 5 The city in eighteenth-century poetry
- 6 “Nature” poetry
- 7 Questions in poetics
- 8 Eighteenth-century women poets and readers
- 9 Creating a national poetry
- 10 The return to the ode
- 11 A poetry of absence
- 12 The poetry of sensibility
- 13 “Pre-Romanticism” and the ends of eighteenth-century poetry
- Index
Summary
Because accounts of eighteenth-century English poetry so commonly stress either its supposed preoccupation with the past or its immersion in the topical present, it may help to begin by speaking of its future. Many of the period's poets did write with a “neo-classical” eye on the classical past, especially Latin models, as indeed did most Renaissance writers. Similarly, many seem to have considered the pressure of present political events one of poetry's larger concerns, as several of the chapters in this book testify, and thus wrote often on timely subjects. But perhaps more distinctive of the eighteenth- century poets than their sense of the past and appetite for news - traits which we partly share - is their tendency to look toward the future.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001