Poetic form and eco-criticism

Here are the books I mentioned yesterday in class:

For eco-critical discussions on Romantic literature, see Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (Harvard, 2002) and James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Palgrave, 2000).

For an in-depth discussion of how Romantic poets use form and genre, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford, 1986). Another important treatment of form appears in Susan Wolfson's Formal Charges (Stanford, 1999).

Curran's argument has many facets, but his approach to defining formal innovation is useful. He argues that genres and forms have a "logic" that arises from the history of their use and the reader's expectations. So, when we recognize the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, it carries withit certain expectations (for example, that it might monumentalize the beloved object in various ways, but it is often playing with the trope of the Petrarchan sonnet, as in "My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun"). Curran argues that poetry of the Romantic period takes up conventional genres while transforming them and redeploying them to address the political, social, and literary climate of the late 18th and early 19th century. Romantic poets often use conventional, recognizable forms--we were discussing terza rima yesterday--while also disrupting reader's expectations about the themes and concepts associated with that form. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" uses terza rima, which would have immediately suggested Dante's Divine Comedy, but Shelley's poem is neither epic nor addressed to religious themes. While he invokes Dante's work (the leaves in the opening section suggest Dante's hell), he doesn't follow it's lead--and in fact, his focus on material nature (wind, leaves, storm) runs directly counter to Dante's use of allegory to plot the soul's journey toward the afterlife. Shelley's indirect political and environmental message in the poem thus pushes up against the thematic logic of the form he has chosen--and this should, as we discussed in class, be disconcerting and make use feel uneasy.