The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry analyzes major premises, preoccupations, and practices of English poets writing from 1700 to the 1790s. These specially-commissioned essays avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to look at the century afresh. Chapters consider such large poetic themes as nature, the city, political passions, the relation of death to desire and dreams, appeals to an imagined future, and the meanings of 'sensibility'. Other chapters explore historical developments such as the connection between poetic couplets and conversation, the conditions of publication, changing theories of poetry and imagination, growing numbers of women poets and readers, the rise of a self-consciously national tradition, and the place of lyric poetry in thought and practice. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for scholars and students.
List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Chronology; 1. Introduction: the future of eighteenth-century poetry John Sitter; 2. Couplets and conversation J. Paul Hunter; 3. Political passions Christine Gerrard; 4. Publishing and reading poetry Barbara M. Benedict; 5. The city in eighteenth-century poetry Brean Hammond; 6. 'Nature' poetry Tim Fulford; 7. Questions in poetics: why and how poetry matters John Sitter; 8. Eighteenth-century women poets and readers Claudia Thomas Kairoff; 9. Creating a national poetry: the tradition of Spenser and Milton David Fairer; 10. The return to the ode Ralph Cohen; 11. A poetry of absence David B. Morris; 12. The poetry of sensibility Patricia Meyer Spacks; 13. 'Pre-Romanticism' and the ends of eighteenth-century poetry Jennifer Keith; Index.
