ACTIVE ROMANTICISM
Active Romanticism
The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice
Edited by Julie Carr & Jeffrey C. Robinson
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Contributors: Dan Beachy-Quick / Julie Carr / Jacques Darras / Rachel Blau DuPlessis / Judith Goldman / Simon Jarvis / Andrew Joron / Nigel Leask / Jennifer Moxley / Bob Perelman / Jeffrey C. Robinson / Jerome Rothenberg / Elizabeth Willis / and Heriberto Yépez
Cover image: Ruckenfigur by Susan Bee, 2013, oil on linen, 24 x 30 in.
Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated “late-Romantic” poetry of the nineteenth century. The original essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by tracing the fundamental continuities between Romanticism’s poetic and political radicalism and the experimental movements in poetry from the late-nineteenth-century to the present day.
According to editors July Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, “active romanticism” is a poetic response, direct or indirect, to pressing social issues and an attempt to redress forms of ideological repression; at its core, “active romanticism” champions democratic pluralism and confronts ideologies that suppress the evidence of pluralism. “Poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race,” declared poet William Blake at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No other statement from the era of the French Revolution marks with such terseness the challenge for poetry to participate in the liberation of human society from forms of inequality and invisibility. No other statement insists so vividly that a poetic event pushing for social progress demands the unfettering of traditional, customary poetic form and language.
Bringing together work by well-known writers and critics, ranging from scholarly studies to poets’ testimonials, Active Romanticism shows Romantic poetry not to be the sclerotic corpse against which the avant-garde reacted but rather the well-spring from which it flowed.
Offering a fundamental rethinking of the history of modern poetry, Carr and Robinson have grouped together in this collection a variety of essays that confirm the existence of Romanticism as an ongoing mode of poetic production that is innovative and dynamic, a continuation of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition, and a form that reacts and renews itself at any given moment of perceived social crisis.
KYLAN RICE’S ESSAY DISCUSSING ACTIVE ROMANTICISM IN WEST BRANCH
REVIEWS
“Moving out across time more than space, Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice . . . brings together poets and some critics to think about a continuing romantic response as active in subsequent poetry, offering an avant-garde rejoinder to continuing oppression and repression.”
STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1500-1900
“In my reading of this wonderful book, we see with piercing clarity why and how the activities of Romanticism still live and move and have their being in postmodern and postromantic contexts.”
JEROME MCGANN, THE ROMANTIC IDEOLOGY AND A CRITIQUE OF MODERN TEXTUAL CRITICISM
“the reconception of Romanticism offered here is interesting and provocative for its rejection of a liberal-progressive narrative of literary history. Carr and Robinson counter liberal historicism with a Walter Benjamin–inspired philosophy of literary history in which crises “of democracy could be said to define a form of Romanticism that can spring up at any moment.””
ERIC POWELL FOR CHICAGO REVIEW
“Julie Carr and Jeffrey Robinson clearly state their aims. They define "active Romanticism" ideologically as a "poetic response . . . to a 'social antagonism' (Marx, Adorno) to lift a repression that, at its core, keeps democratic pluralism in check"“