[Download] "Spasmodic Poetics and Clough's Apostasies." by Victorian Poetry ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Spasmodic Poetics and Clough's Apostasies.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 198 KB
Description
RICHARD CRONIN COMPLETES A RECENT TALLY OF THE INFAMOUS SPASMODIC poets with the unusual addition of Arthur Hugh Clough, a darling of Rugby and Oxford and a bosom-friend of the fervently anti-Spasmodic Matthew Arnold. (1) Surely Cronin means to be provocative, yet he points to a real question concerning the cultural reaches of such critically marginalized literary movements as the Spasmodic one. Although Clough's contemporaries never explicitly identified him as a Spasmodic, his mid-century poetry often probes the sensitive religious topics of more recognizably Spasmodic poets like Philip James Bailey and Alexander Smith, and like them he frequently asks whether poetry performs a specifically religious function. Of course, Clough was painfully ambivalent about Christianity after the Oxford Movement and the English popularizing of the Higher Criticism, and so his affinity for the Spasmodics reveals how badly poets such as he wished to fix the relation between religion and poetry. Eventually, Clough became disillusioned with the poetry of Bailey and Smith (a disillusionment encouraged by Arnold and other friends), but his repudiation of a poetic solution to his religious problems corresponded to a dramatic falling-off in his poetic achievement. If Clough's later poetic infertility is, as I suppose, linked to his rejection of the Spasmodics, then he is the foremost casualty of the great mid-century "critical battle" to which this special issue is devoted. (2) 1