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<\/a><\/p>\nDavid Stewart is\u00a0Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at Northumbria University<\/a>.\u00a0 He has published widely on figures including Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey and Charles Lamb and on topics including short fiction, ephemerality, paradox, commerce, mass culture and the politics of style.\u00a0 His first monograph,\u00a0Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture<\/em><\/a>, was published in 2011 and considered the qualities of the extraordinary wave of periodicals that burgeoned in the period after the Napoleonic wars.\u00a0 His new book,\u00a0The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt<\/a><\/em>, which we discuss below, has just been published by Palgrave.<\/p>\n 1) When do you first remember encountering the poetry of the 1820s and 1830s, and what led you to want to write a monograph about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n For a long time I didn\u2019t know that I was writing a book about it.\u00a0 I\u2019d been teaching Leigh Hunt\u2019s Story of Rimini <\/em>for a few years and kept having fascinating discussions with students who loved it, and yet found it oddly unstable, almost, but not quite, laughable.\u00a0 There are some kinds of poetry that we don\u2019t quite know how to read: do we look for a deep and serious philosophy or a buried political context beneath the surface, or do we delight in its seemingly superficial charms?\u00a0 I found some other poets who provoked the same reaction in me, and I realised what linked them was that they fell somewhere between \u2018Romantic\u2019 and \u2018Victorian\u2019 poetry.\u00a0 A poem like Rimini<\/em> might be the beginning of a poetic history that never quite took shape.\u00a0 The usual story is that the poetry market collapsed in the mid-1820s, and the few poets who did produce poetry were not very good.\u00a0 The fact that neither part of this is true (the market did not collapse, and these poets are just joyous to read) was something I wanted to correct.\u00a0 Equally, though, I kept coming back to my own unstable reactions to these poets: the wavering uncertainty with which we view this hinterland might be its most valuable feature.\u00a0 I wanted to bring the period\u2019s poetic scene to a fuller attention, but without giving it the firm outlines of a clearly demarcated \u2018literary period\u2019.<\/p>\n 2) Your subtitle characterises the two decades as ‘a period of doubt’, a doubt manifested both in poets’ responses to their contexts and in later critics’ attempts to frame their achievements.\u00a0 How can working to understand the doubts that poets struggled with help us to gain a better understanding of their cultural moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n I find doubt a fascinating state of mind.\u00a0 Doubt can be active, even aggressive, but it can also be comic, a matter of being baffled; it might even produce wonder.\u00a0 It is not a fixed state; instead, when we are in doubt we can test things out, we can speculate on what things are, or how things might be.\u00a0 Byron writes so well about doubt in Don Juan<\/em>, and I like especially these lines in Canto 1: \u2018What is the end of Fame? \u2018tis but to fill \/ A certain portion of uncertain paper: \/ Some liken it to climbing up a hill, \/ Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour\u2019.\u00a0 The poets of this period are remarkable partly because they thought so often, and so playfully, about the possibility that critics like me might come along and sift and sort them into a period.\u00a0 The form that that writing takes \u2013 the fact that it is on \u2018uncertain paper\u2019 \u2013 is the means by which it can be transmitted to future readers, but equally is itself a matter that prompts doubts.\u00a0 Are some ways of \u2018filling\u2019 that paper (some metrical techniques) more \u2018certain\u2019 of Fame than others?\u00a0 Are some kinds<\/em> of paper (some methods of publishing) more ephemeral, more \u2018uncertain\u2019, than others?\u00a0 The lesson that I hope I\u2019ve taken from these poets is that doubt can be a pleasure.\u00a0 To \u2018gain a better understanding\u2019 of this \u2018cultural moment\u2019 means, I think, accepting that we\u2019ll always be groping around in vapour.<\/p>\n 3) Introducing the book, you stress the divide between emergent formalist and commercial aesthetics, and also discuss the prominence of light verse during the period, but you stress that these three strands have more in common than the discourses surrounding them often admitted.\u00a0 How would you characterise the defining qualities of these three modes, and what are the main things that unite them?<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the real pleasures of writing this book has been getting back to reading poetry attentively.\u00a0 We tend to associate this kind of \u2018formalist\u2019 close reading with a detached idealism, and also with only particular kinds of poet.\u00a0 One group of poets might seem to fit that model.\u00a0 I discuss the young Browning and Tennyson, but also poets like Hartley Coleridge, George Darley, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes who have always found \u2018fit audience, though few\u2019, admirers who pride themselves on hearing the delicate modulations of their metre.\u00a0 We can place these poets as the first buds of a Victorian aestheticism that comes into full bloom with Walter Pater.\u00a0 They are opposed to another group associated especially with the material form of their commercial books: the poets of the literary annuals, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon.\u00a0 These poets use metres, of course, but metre is deemed an irrelevance in books that are merely objects for display in the drawing room.\u00a0 A final group \u2013 Thomas Hood, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, John Hamilton Reynolds, for example \u2013 provide something like what Kingsley Amis calls \u2018light verse\u2019: punning, bright-eyed wit that skims over the surface of society, valuable for the very perfection of the metrical surface they create and polish.\u00a0 The attempt to create oppositions between kinds of poet is important, most particularly the role that gender plays in that process.\u00a0 But they all share a curiously enabling doubt about categorisation.\u00a0 Landon, for example, plays brilliantly with verse form and its relation to the books in which she appears; that tactic is mirrored by George Darley who, when he was not writing poems about fairies, was busy writing abusive articles about Landon.\u00a0 The fact that Darley, Hood, and Hemans are all bound up in the green silk covers of the annual The Amulet<\/em> in 1828 suggests some of the possibilities and perplexities this culture presents.\u00a0 All of them think carefully, and with a disarming self-consciousness, about the place their poetry might have in culture, and how their poetry might form itself (metrically and materially) for readers in their own time and in an unguessable future.\u00a0 It\u2019s a conversation that is worth tuning in to, particularly in our own critical moment as we attempt to rethink critical methods like \u2018formalism\u2019, \u2018historicism\u2019 and \u2018book history\u2019.<\/p>\n 4) If you were selecting a few key poems as standard-bearers for the poetry of this period (for a MA seminar, say), which would these be?<\/strong><\/p>\n This feels like a slightly mischievous question: I feel uncomfortable with the idea of \u2018standard bearers\u2019, poets marching under the banner of a territory that I would prefer to remain bewitchingly vague!\u00a0 But no MA seminar can try to cover everything.\u00a0 Some of these poets are well known: Hemans, Landon and Clare need no introduction for Romanticists.\u00a0 There\u2019s been excellent recent work on poets I look at like Hartley Coleridge and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.\u00a0 Others will, I hope, prove more interesting than they have hitherto: George Darley and Winthrop Mackworth Praed especially.\u00a0 I end with a section on the young Tennyson, who hardly needs my help to find fame, and consider how his work starts to change when we place him alongside Clare, Landon, Praed, Hood, Hunt and others.\u00a0 I think we might learn the lesson from the editors of annuals like The Amulet<\/em> and Friendship\u2019s Offering<\/em>: place a diverse selection of poems together, and see what chance lights are thrown out.\u00a0 If I had to choose one poem, though, that gives a glimpse of what I love about this period, it\u2019d be Praed\u2019s \u2018The Fancy Ball\u2019<\/a> from the New Monthly Magazine<\/em> of 1828.<\/p>\n 5) What new projects are you currently at work on?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m working on place and fiction in the Romantic period.\u00a0 My focus is on the Anglo-Scottish borderlands, and on writers including Walter Scott, Allan Cunningham and James Hogg.\u00a0 There\u2019s a relationship between humour, lies, fiction, and the experience of movement that I want to track.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been approaching it from a longstanding interest in this \u2018region\u2019 and these writers, but also via theories of place and mobility in geography and anthropology.\u00a0 The anthropologist Tim Ingold\u2019s work has been a revelation for me, as has work that sits between the creative and the critical by Rebecca Solnit and Kapka Kassabova.\u00a0 I have an article on James Hogg that is the first fruit of this work: it should be coming out in The Yearbook of English Studies<\/em> in a special issue on the 1830s.\u00a0 I\u2019ve also got a piece about Wordsworth and parody coming out this year in European Romantic Review<\/em>.\u00a0 I secretly want to write something about V. S. Naipaul\u2019s The Enigma of Arrival<\/em>, but don\u2019t tell anybody, least of all my research lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" David Stewart is\u00a0Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at Northumbria University.\u00a0 He has published widely on figures including Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey and Charles Lamb and on topics… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1961"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1967,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961\/revisions\/1967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}