Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry

Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry
ISBN-10
0814210082
ISBN-13
9780814210086
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
226
Language
English
Published
2005
Publisher
Ohio State University Press
Author
David G. Riede

Description

"Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy" - we might refer to it as depression - and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive."--BOOK JACKET.

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