Poetic Individualism

A collection of selected poetry expressing thought provoking indiviualistic thoughts, emotions, questions, and observations. Prepare to question yourself, your views, your world surrounding you, and your purpose in this existence we refer to as life. Poetic Individualism takes you through the mind and developing madness of one individuals outlook on life in the current common day world. Whether you are looking to pick up a book and read it all the way through, or prefer to read a couple random pages at a time, this book is a perfect fit.

This anthology has a double aim: to present a body of poetry, none of it easily available, some of it never before reproduced, and to point up a particular trend, until now nearly lost sight of in the maze of generalizations about eighteenth-century French poetry. This trend, called individualist, in contradistinction to the academic and universalist trends of the century, has been chosen since it is the least known and most original of the three. The individualist poets are avowed moderns, and their attitude toward poetry and their concept of its nature often anticipate attitudes held by our poets of our own time. There has not been available to this point a sufficiently representative body of poems by these poets, a gap that Professors Finch and Joliat have attempts to fill with their anthology. Readers will find the notes to the poems especially useful, since many of them provide out-of-the-way background material and, as well, offer new insights into the poetry of the individualist poets as a group.

Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed. In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes—abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia—she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.

It has long been the custom to condemn eighteenth-century French poetry outright as generally unworthy of attention. However, in keeping with a recent change of attitude towards this vast and diverse body of literature, Professor Finch here undertakes to isolate a certain group of poets, belonging to the first half of the century, who may appropriately be called individualistes and who are in various ways characteristic of a definite and important trend of their time. The authors he has chosen were selected from the larger group of individualists because each provides, in addition to his poems, a complete statement of his own conception of poetry and of that conception which is common to the group as a whole. Since the works treated are comparatively unfamiliar the author has considered them from a historical and an analytical as well as a critical point of view. In addition he has devoted three special chapters to a literary historian (Evrard Titon du Tillet) and to three critical theorists (Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Yves-Marie André, and Charles Batteux) whose contemporary writings, while they may or may not have influenced the poets here examined, support, reflect, or confirm their ideas and practice. Texts of these poets are not easily available and the numerous representative quotations from the poems given in this book will be welcomed by the reader.

This book attends to four poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of feeling, perception, and experience: each poet responds with unusual commitment to the Romantic idea of art as personal expression. The book looks closely at the vitality and intricacy of the poets’ language, the personal candour of their subject matter, and their sense, obdurate but persuasive, of their own strangeness. As it traces the tact and imagination with which each of the four writers realises the possibilities of individualism in lyric, it affirms the vibrancy of their contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry.

This book takes a fresh look at the relations between literature and biography by tracing the history of their connections through three hundred years of French literature. The starting point for this history is the eighteenth century when the term 'biography' first entered the French language and when the word 'literature' began to acquire its modern sense of writing marked by an aesthetic character. Arguing that the idea of literature is inherently open to revision and contestation, Ann Jefferson examines the way in which biographically-orientated texts have been engaged in questioning and revising definitions of literature. At the same time, she tracks the evolving forms of biographical writing in French culture, and proposes a reappraisal of biography in terms not only of its forms, but also of its functions. Although Ann Jefferson's book has powerful theoretical implications for both biography and the literary, it is first and foremost a history, offering a comprehensive new account of the development of French literature through this dual focus on the question of literature and on the relations between literature and biography. It offers original readings of major authors and texts in the light of these concerns, beginning with Rousseau and ending with 'life-writing' contemporary authors such as Pierre Michon and Jacques Roubaud. Other authors discussed include Mme de Stäel, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarmé, Schwob, Proust, Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Genet, Barthes, and Roger Laporte.